GS PAPER II: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.

Context: A detailed report sheds light on who makes all this single-use plastic, 130 million tons a year at last count, and who makes money from it.

Some highlights of the report:

• Governments are also big stakeholders in this industry.
• About 40% of the largest single-use plastic makers are partly owned by governments, including China and Saudi Arabia.
• A big challenge is that the economics favor more plastic production.
• It is far cheaper to make a soda bottle out of newly produced plastic than from recycled plastic.
• European Union issued a directive calling for consumer brands to use at least 30% recycled content in plastic bottles by 2025.

What is Plastic Pollution?

• Plastic pollution occurs when plastic has gathered in an area and has begun to negatively impact the natural environment and create problems for plants, wildlife, and even the human population.
• This includes killing plant life and posing dangers to local animals.
• Plastic is an incredibly useful material, but it is not biodegradable.

Various Causes of Plastic Pollution

• As plastic is less expensive, it is one of the most widely available and overused items in the world today.
• Rapid urbanization and population growth increase the demand of cheap plastics.
• Since it is an affordable and durable material, it is utilized in every other way possible, from packaging materials to plastic bottles and containers, straws to plastic carry bags.
• Plastic takes 400 years and even more to Decompose. The decomposition rate of plastic typically ranges from 500 to 600 years, depending on the type.
• Abandoned Fishing Nets
• Disposal of plastic is often mismanaged; it ends up in landfills.
• Burning plastic is incredibly toxic and can lead to harmful atmospheric conditions and deadly illnesses.

Serious Effects of Plastic Pollution

• Negative Effects on Human Health: Microplastics entering the human body via direct exposures through ingestion or inhalation can lead to an array of health impacts, including inflammation, genotoxicity, oxidative stress, apoptosis, and necrosis, which are linked to an array of negative health outcomes including cancer, cardiovascular diseases.
• Plastic-contaminated seafood: Scientists have found micro plastics in 114 marine species, and around one-third of these end up on our plates.
• Upsets the Food Chain: Because it comes in sizes large and small, polluting plastics even affect the world’s tiniest organisms, such as plankton.
• Groundwater Pollution: Most of the litter and pollution affecting the world’s oceans and groundwater

comes from plastics.

• Land Pollution: When plastic is dumped in landfills, it interacts with water and forms hazardous chemicals. When these chemicals seep underground, they degrade the water quality. The wind carries and deposits plastic from one place to another, increasing the land litter.
• Air Pollution: Burning of plastic in the open air leads to environmental pollution due to the release of poisonous chemicals.
• Economic impacts: Plastic pollution costs $13 billion in economic damage to marine ecosystems per year. This includes losses to the fishing industry and tourism, as well as the cost to clean up beaches. Economic costs include those linked to clean-up operations, litter removal, the repair and replacement of damaged vessels and gear, reduced fishing catches, and a decline in coastal tourism and impact on related industries.

Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016 ·        It aims to increase minimum thickness of plastic carry bags from 40 to 50 microns. ·        Expand the jurisdiction of applicability from the municipal area to rural areas, because plastic has reached rural areas also. ·        Extended Producer Responsibility:To bring in the responsibilities of producers and generators, both in plastic waste management system and to introduce collect back system of plastic waste by the producers/brand owners, as per extended producers responsibility ·        Introduced collection of plastic waste managementfee through pre-registration of the producers, importers of plastic carry bags/multilayered packaging and vendors selling the same for establishing the waste management system ·        Promote use of plastic waste for road construction as per Indian Road Congress guidelines or energy recovery, or waste to oil etc. for gainful utilization of waste and also address the waste disposal issue.

• Marine life: The most visible and disturbing impacts of marine plastics are the ingestion, suffocation and entanglement of hundreds of marine species. Marine wildlife such as seabirds, whales, fishes and turtles, mistake plastic waste for prey, and most die of starvation as their stomachs are filled with plastic debris.

 

What are microplastics?

• Microplastics are plastic debris smaller than 5mm in length, or about the size of a sesame seed.
• They come from a variety of sources, one of them is when larger pieces of plastic degrade into smaller pieces, which are difficult to detect.

Why is microplastic pollution especially harmful?

• The durability of plastic, which implies that plastic can take hundreds to thousands of years to decompose depending on the type of plastic and where it has been dumped.
• In the oceans, plastic pollution impacts marine life, ocean health, coastal tourism and even human health.
• Over the past few years, various news reports have shown that marine animals such as whales, seabirds and turtles unknowingly ingest plastic and often suffocate.
• For humans, too, marine plastic pollution is harmful if it reaches the food chain. For instance, microplastics have been found in tap water, beer and even salt.
• One of the first studies to estimate plastic pollution in human ingestion that was published in June 2019 said that an average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic each year. Consumption of plastic by humans is harmful since several chemicals that are used to produce plastics can be

Measures taken by government:

• India has pledged to ban all single-use plastics by 2022.
• All offices of central and state governments and major PSUs have been told to prohibit single-use plastic products.
• India has banned imports of solid plastic waste.
• India has passed the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016 and introduced the Extended Producer Responsibility.

Way Forward:

Major way forwards are the 3R’s +E:

• Reduce: To efficiently reduce plastic pollution, there is an evident need of reducing our usage of plastic. It means changing our everyday behaviors an not using plastic when there is a better alternative to it and only using plastic when strictly necessary.
• Reuse: Plastic may cause pollution when poorly managed but it has lots of advantages too, such as being resistant. Many plastic items can therefore be reused or used for different purposes. Before throwing plastic items, it is important to consider how they can be reused.
• Recycle: Plastic recycling consists of collecting plastic waste and reprocessing it into new products, to reduce the amount of plastic in the waste stream.
• Educate: Another crucial solution is education in order to increase awareness and behavioral change.

https://indianexpress.com/article/world/who-behind-global-surge-single-use-plastic-7321181/