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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?
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.
Seattle has talked about banning them. That scares the hell out of 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.
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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?
So when you walk your dog - where do you put the poo? In nice breathable paper sacks?
...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.
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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
I assume it has more to do with gumming up water treatment.
Plastic can be problematic closer to home than the ocean.
Clogged drains, clogged water treatment, these things cost money and/or spread disease.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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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