美国国家公共电台 NPR An Indian State Bans Plastic Bags, Straws And More. Will It Work?

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

India's largest city has banned plastic bags and packaging. In India, people actually produce only a tenth of the plastic waste that Americans do. The problem is where it ends up, as NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from Mumbai.

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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE¹: I'm trying to go for a morning jog on my local beach in Mumbai. It's dawn. There's a little bit of a drizzle². But I've got to literally³ clear a path through ankle-deep plastic trash, and the problem is particularly bad in the monsoon⁴ season right now.

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AFROZ SHAH: See, because monsoon, the waves and the tides are on the higher side, lot of water enters into the creek⁵, and these creeks⁶ are full of plastic.

FRAYER: Afroz Shah is a lawyer who got sick of watching floodwaters from Mumbai's creeks flush trash out into the ocean and then up onto his local beach, so he launched a cleanup campaign on Facebook and Twitter. Today, there are about 50 volunteers here.

What are you finding here?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: All plastic - plastic pouches⁷. That's...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: We find shoes laying around.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Packagings - that's what we're finding the most.

FRAYER: As volunteers pick up trash, authorities are going to the source. The Indian state of Maharashtra has banned plastic packaging - bags, Styrofoam, takeout containers, even cutlery. The goal is for all of India to do the same by 2022. Plastic waste is a public health issue, says activist⁸ Vandana Trivedi, a mother of two who lives near one of Asia's biggest garbage dumps here in Mumbai. It's the size of 200 football fields, and it sometimes catches fire.

VANDANA TRIVEDI: It's a very faint - you need to have a nose to pick up polluted air, and I think I've developed it now. It's, like, full of methane⁹ there. When...

FRAYER: Yeah. When plastic burns, it emits all sort of...

TRIVEDI: It's carcinogenic.

FRAYER: India does recycle, but informally. The poorest of the poor sort trash by hand literally on the dump pile. Life expectancy¹⁰ there is 39. Trivedi says this plastic ban is great PR for India, but...

TRIVEDI: Where is the education around the whole thing, right? People are clueless as to what is banned, what is to - not banned.

FRAYER: Nevertheless, stores are scrambling¹¹ to comply or face fines of $70 and up and jail time for repeat offenders¹². Dry cleaner Sunil Srivastava covers freshly pressed shirts in sheer plastic.

SUNIL SRIVASTAVA: Yeah, it's all plastic. But we...

FRAYER: But he now has to remove it before delivering to customers.

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FRAYER: So you will put this paper on the clothes now.

SRIVASTAVA: Yeah, this paper.

FRAYER: But the paper costs him more, and it falls apart in the rain. A few doors down, Chiman Singh used to sell milk and yogurt in plastic bags.

CHIMAN SINGH: Yeah, milk...

FRAYER: This is the milk in these big metal barrels.

SINGH: Yogurt and milk.

FRAYER: Yogurt and milk. So I have to bring my own container.

SINGH: Yeah.

FRAYER: He says he's lost about half of his customers. Stuffing a cloth bag in your purse is one thing, but who wants to carry around an empty milk bottle? At a fruit and veg stand, Sheru Mann fills her cloth bag and wonders if a country as large and as poor as India can pull this off.

SHERU MANN: There is 1.2 billion people living in India. How can you change the system?

FRAYER: I guess they're trying to start with this ban, right?

MANN: Hope so. Hope so. Hope so.

FRAYER: Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Mumbai.

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