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Mumbai Bans Plastic Bags, Bottles, and Single-Use Plastic Containers (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Mumbai has the become the largest Indian city to ban single-use plastics, with residents caught using plastic bags, cups or bottles to face penalties of up to 25,000 rupees (~$365) and three months in jail from Monday. Council inspectors in navy blue jackets have been posted across the city to catch businesses or residents still using plastic bags. Penalties have already kicked in for businesses and several, reportedly including a McDonald's and Starbucks, have already been fined. Penalties range from 5,000 rupees (~$73) for first-time offenders to 25,000 rupees (~$365) and the threat of three months' jail for those caught repeatedly using single-use plastics.
Will they have some sort of designated replacement?
Sweet, now we can measure the rest of Donald Trump's treasonous life in prison in plastic bags. Fitting.
What about going after the people who make/distribute the bags? If I see someone using (better yet, re-using) an item, that's a good thing. Now you are just going to encourage people to throw them out. In places that won't lead back to them.
Have gnu, will travel.
than every city in the USA. What are we number one at again?
Only I can judge you.
That would be more fair.
And, yes, there have been replacements for plastic bags for decades.
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"penalties of up to 25,000 rupees (~$365) and three months in jail from Monday."
That is excessive punishment.
This is the government using fines to raise revenues.
Government greed.
More worried about the container that clean water comes in than the filth in their rivers.
How about fixing the raw sewage in the rivers before banning the only means for drinking clean water.
They will have plastic and they WILL like it.
Seattle has talked about banning them. That scares the hell out of me.
What's happening over there in India? Sending someone to jail over a plastic bag (even repeatedly) sounds an awful lot like fascism to me.
I've used a lot of plastic bags quite a few times.
I have a Fuji water bottle I bought at an airport that I like the size of, so I've been refilling it for a few years.
Almost anything CAN be reusable if you try. What a shame they are getting rid of some really useful items that took a long time for human to advance enough to produce.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and the threat of three months' jail for those caught repeatedly using single-use plastics.
If people are repeatedly using them, they're not single-use plastics, by definition.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
About fucking time! But I agree with the fact that we should go after who make plastic containers not the final users. It's really simple, you want to make plastic container and packaging? Good, you must abide to some strict regulation that ensure that your products "will be fully recycled" and you must account for them, every month you put out 500'000 plastic container? Then every month you must scoop up 500'000 container to be recycled in your factory.
So when you walk your dog - where do you put the poo? In nice breathable paper sacks?
FTA:
India’s use of plastic is less than half of the global average: about 11kg a year per capita compared with 109kg in the US.
In a world where 20,000 children a day die of poverty, 25 lbs of plastic a year per capita really just doesn't seem that high on the list of the world's problems. To me it seems like vita signaling: take some trivial issue and get all self-righteous about how if you care about such a trivial issue then you must really care about the other issues. That's not to say that I'm opposed to alternatives to disposable plastic containers. But unless you can solve the problems of infectious disease associated with reusable containers then you're likely to create quite a but of suffering and even death.
...lots of Tupperware parties.
Nope.
Using and overusing plastic bags is an obvious lack of respect and should be punished.
aaaaaaa
The problem is 99.9999999 of the bottles aren't a "Pet bottle" like your's.
They are the trash that line our citie's surroundings.
They're PET bottles, not reusable, not recycled as a matter of fact.
aaaaaaa
When you go to a fish shop, ask him that to take away a fish, use a padfoot of paper or a biodegradable bag instead of a plastic bag.
What marvelous is it three decades ago!!!
context matters. Very, very few people will reuse a thin plastic bottle. I use plastic bags from the grocery store but a) I get more than even I can use (only have 1 dog) and b) they're too flimsy for much else.
You have to consider what the majority of people are going to do and not what a few outliers do when you make policy.
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Worse than you think: Some of those rivers get half-burned human (and various un-burned animal) corpses dumped into them on a very regular basis (and if we're talking about the Ganges, we're talking near-industrial-scale corpse-dumping), let alone the massive amount of un/semi-treated sewage.
I guess this little step is better than no step, but yeah, you're right... there are way bigger problems that could be addressed here.
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The problem is 99.9999999 of the bottles aren't a "Pet bottle" like your's.
Based on what I have seen I highly doubt the percentage of people re-using light plastic bottles is that low.
The biggest change around that has been airport bottle filling stations. I see people using those all the time when I fly from old plastic bottles. In fact old plastic bottles are BETTER for this when they are lighter, because they compact flat when empty until you are ready to re-fill.
So in India for example, you could have bottle filling stations all around a city an encourage people to use bottles multiple times. The bottled water companies might not like it but it would be a massive public good if they could offer truly clean water to everyone in a city.
For plastic bags, no reason you could not get a small credit for bringing you own plastic bags the same way you do for the fabric bags in stores.
Plastic bags and bottles are really, really useful - again I ask why do we need to throw out such useful tech simply because it has been misused and carelessly discarded by some?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
how much of that bottle has leached into you so far?
As far as I'm concerned this fear of plastic "leeching" into you in any quantity is right up there with anti-vaxxer nonsense.
I've used the same bottle for years, and there is absolutely no change in structural strength or even appearance nor taste in the water I fill the bottle with. So how much of it could possibly have "leeched" into me - not to mention that plastic is wholly inert anyway, and even if I chose to eat the bottle it would simply flow through my system and go out the other end with almost no change.
I'll grant you some *reusable* plastic bottles can lend water a bit of an aftertaste. I'm still not scared of what tiny amounts of whatever may be in there, however the taste puts me off enough that is actually why I prefer to simply re-use bottles used to sell bottled water, because they impart no taste to the water at all unlike the heavier and supposedly more reusable plastic bottles (stainless steel bottles seem mostly fine, but are way too heavy).
So getting rid of the plastic bottles water is sold in, is actually a *detriment* to people who will be forced to use reusable plastic bottles that do actually leech something noticeable into water...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...for mortuaries disposing of dead council workers.
Back in the 80s when we hated commies and gay people, we just drank put of the water fountain. Today in our progressive compassionate era where we hate racists and pedophiles, we are afraid of touching out fellow human beings because they carry germs. Hence we have a massive plastics industry making everything from plastic gloves for food handling to plastic bottles to hold water.
Distance from Mumbai to Allahabad (a city on the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga Rivers):
1,352 km (~840.094 mi)
people still poop in the streets/beaches out of superstitious fear, lack of facilities, or pure cultural inertia. all of that untreated poop goes into streams, rivers & oceans. they've tried numerous public works projects & advertising to stop it.
i see Penguinisto's post mentioning cows and cadavres in a discussion about plastic as flame bait. nonetheless, i hazard human cadavres (or other half-singed animal remains) have a much slimmer decomposition half-life than polyethlyne plastic compounds etc.
"eight to twelve years to decompose [a human cadavre] to a skeleton" and not sure how many decades more for the bones to dustify.
vs. a 500 to 1000 year half-life for some plastics ?
I live in Pune, about 120km east of Mumbai and its the same. Its strange not to get straws to drink soda in McDonalds now. But a good change anyways. The country is getting littered way too much.
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Sending someone to jail over a plastic bag (even repeatedly) sounds an awful lot like fascism to me.
You have a wrong understanding of what fascism is.
Fascism is a right-wing nationalism where corporations and government are in bed with each other. That's pretty much the opposite of what we see here.
Were you thinking of "police state", perhaps?
If India gave a crap about the world they would ban using the best antibiotics in the world on chickens to increase egg production.
The half burned corpse problem is about funeral rites. Imagine that in the US suddenly out of ecological concern everybody is suddenly requested to burn their loved one. Some might not see a problem, but for many religious folk it would be. Same with the funeral rite on the gange. Heck a way to alleviate the problem would be for the state to provide fuel for the poorest to get a proper burning, but stopping those funeral rite won't work. Anyway the corpse will rot and be washed out. The plastic bags will not.
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>> So in India for example, you could have bottle filling stations all around a city an encourage people to use bottles multiple times
Doesn't work.
In these countries, people don't trust tap water.
aaaaaaa
drinking from a plastic cup can get you 3 months in jail, all the while nothing much is done about the rape problem they have.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I don't think the issue here is percentage of people so much as percentage of bottles. We do this kind of re-use all the time, but the reality is our recycle bin is absolutely full to overflowing with plastic bottles at the end of the week anyway.
I agree with your solutions BTW, I just felt the lead sentence placed the emphasis on the wrong group. Realistically, there's a problem in (most of) the US in terms of emphasizing recycling over reuse, with little incentive given to return bottles to the supermarkets that sold them (who wouldn't know what to do with them if we did.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Let's see how this plays out. Humanity as a whole needs to move towards zero-garbage. Like, fast.
A doorstep country showing the first world how it is done is a nice thing indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You have no clue what gets dumped into the river, do you ? Only the ashes and big bones that do not disintegrate even in a large fire are dumped. A 70 kg human body leaves behind much less than 1 kg stuff to be dumped. Thin / weak people leave a fistful.
For all purposes of hygiene , that part can be licked by babies and nothing much would happen except some nourishment. Calling it half-burned displays your colossal ignorance.
Anyway it is far more environmentally sustainable than burying dead bodies in the ground, to speak nothing of preventing contagious diseases.
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A neighbor of ours did a great job of dispatching a skunk without stinking up the place. So he tied it into one of the thin white plastic bags and tossed it into the woods. Only one problem, the handles of the bag got caught on a branch too high to reach. So, the bag just hung there for a few days and apparently the smell started to come out of the bag. Our neighborhood had the slight smell of skunk every time we were downwind from that bag. So that is use #2368 for plastic bags!
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Plastic litter and waste is a symptom of a larger problem (bad parenting? manners? culture?). Treating the symptom will have short term effects until the impracticality of policing this long term fades and you are back to square one.