According to a United Nations’s report, more than one million polythene bags are consumed in the world every minute. That’s an attractive number for a businessman, looking for an opportunity to cash this viable commercial opportunity. But for an environmentalist, it’s an alarming figure that sets off a million warning bells ringing in his or her head.
There is no denying the fact that a battle between proponents and opponents of polythene has been going on ever since Bangladesh became the first nation to ban the use of thin polythene bags in 2002. The battle has grown ferocious, year after year, but unfortunately, even after the passage of more than sixteen years, the world has yet to decide whether to vote for or against the indiscriminate use of polythene. For now, in this battle between wealth and sustainability of life, the former has emerged victorious. Alas, man is the only creature on this Earth that can compromise its very existence just for the sake of personal convenience! Our ignorant love for the mortal self is so deep that we are even ready to sacrifice the life of our own children for maintaining our daily comfort.
There is a drastic need to remove the dark clouds of ignorance if we really wish to hand over a sustainable environment to our future generations. The problem does not lie with the laws, though time and again governments have failed miserably in implementing them. The problem lies in our inability to comprehend the magnitude of the herculean disaster that waits for us if we continue with our present ostrich approach. An ostrich is said to bury its head in the sand on sensing an imminent danger and pretend that nothing is going to happen. I don’t vouch for the truth in this statement, but I can surely bet that we are doing the same. And we are not doing this with just polythene. We have the same approach when we handle other sensitive issues like smoking and drinking that threaten our basic lives. It is very amusing to see millions of rupees being spent on advertisements that are supposedly targeted at convincing people to desist from the use of cigarettes and alcohol. But at the same time, governments all around the world are not ashamed of maintaining this industry as it is a big source of revenue for them. That is the level of hypocrisy we inculcate deep within. Governments do not comprise of some alien mechanical beings but are run by the same species of ‘Homo Sapiens’ to which all of us belong. They are also driven by the same self-caring motives like the rest of us.
In order to emerge victorious in this battle against the polythene usage, we need to make some hard commitments, take some harsh decisions and modify our lifestyles. First of all, we need to decide whether we truly love our children, our families, our neighbourhood or do we just pretend to do that. Because, if we truly care for these things, can we slow poison them? How can we be so ruthless to snatch the right to an ecosystem worth living from our dear ones? Polythene is killing the Earth slowly. It is turning fertile fields into barren lands. It is getting dissolved in the water that we drink and has already begun to run in the veins of our future generations. Do we need to reaffirm our commitments towards, at least, those we love?
Secondly, we need to decide what is more important, the material well-being or a healthy life. No doubt that polythene has lucrative economic probabilities but are we ready to trade the lives of our children for that? Being a businessman, shall my vision get blinded with the shine of the nickel? There was no polythene bag before the sixties. Does that mean that there were no business opportunities before that for manufacturers of packaging materials? Was the packaging industry not surviving before that? If we can discover Polyethylene by accident, we surely can discover a more environmentally sustainable option if we seriously put our heads together to search for one. It’s time to decide between wealth and health. Wealth can be lost and earned, but human life once gone is gone forever.
Next, we need to do away with this “disposable culture”, lest we are willing to dispose our precious lives with it. The biggest problem of our contemporary generation is that we are becoming careless beings. We do not know the difference between love and lust. We collect whatever appeals to us. We use it, play with it and then we throw it away as soon as we are bored or it’s utility for us is over. The mass production of things at much affordable and cheaper prices has also contributed to that. We are not used to handling abundance. First, we took for granted that God has given us everything in abundance. We recklessly overused our natural resources, always wasting more than what we actually consumed. Then, when we ourselves started producing commodities in abundant quantities, we did the same, again. Who needs to preserve an empty plastic bottle, a used straw, a spoon, a plate or for that matter a polythene bag, when another thing is always available at a very cheap price? The sheer availability of things has made us insensitive towards them. We have started identifying the value of things with the price tag they carry. Polythene Carry Bags are too cheap to be preserved. They carry no significant value. So, why care for them? Use them, dispose them, forget about them until they reappear to choke our own life to death.
In a nut shell, we need a cultural shift if we need to overcome this menace of polythene. We must understand that all we receive comes from this ecosystem and all we give goes back into this ecosystem only.
I have not attempted to enlist the Do’s and Don’ts to minimise the use of polythene bags here. I believe that we are already overloaded with all the information that we need to possess regarding the judicious use of polythene. There is urgent need to get rid of our problematic mindset and create a “new sustainable environmentalist mindset”, not only among the general public that are mass consumers of polythene but also among the governments that regulate their use and the businessmen who are involved in the manufacturing and trading of plastic materials. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we leave plenty behind us to be enjoyed by the future generations. Unless we seriously decide to look for an alternative to polythene bags, it is highly unlikely that we will ever succeed in winning our battle against this menace. We owe this Earth to our future generations. God’s creation is surely going to exist in the future too. It is up to us to decide whether we wish our own future generations to exist and prosper or be doomed and perish in the darkness of space and time. It’s high time that we decide.
