NEW DELHI: Under the purview of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0 hosted the fourth instalment of Swachh Talks, a national peer learning webinar series, on ‘Managing Plastic Waste,’ on July 29, 2022. The purpose of this Swachh Talks episode was to foster dialogue about the necessity of successfully managing plastic trash in order to achieve the Mission’s vision of ‘Garbage Free Cities.’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has continually stressed the need for people to band together to fight plastic pollution and adopt ‘Swachhata’ as a way of life, when addressing the country through his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ series. PM Modi made the first declaration regarding phasing out of single-use plastic on August 15, 2019. As homage to Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birthday, PM Modi called for a nationwide campaign against single-use plastics. Since then, states in India have taken action to implement the ban on single-use plastics starting July 1, 2022. A month after the enforcement of the ban, the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0’s ‘Swachh Talks’ episode asked cities, states, organisations, and Swachhata Champions from all around the country to assess the progress being made on handling plastic trash.
In order to contextualise the advancements being made across the cities, Roopa Mishra, Joint Secretary and National Mission Director, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban, MoHUA, Government of India, highlighted India’s role as an emerging global leader in the field of sustainable sanitation and waste management. The Extended Producers Responsibility framework and the 2016 Plastic Waste Management Rules were discussed by Dr Satyendra Kumar, Director, Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change, Government of India. He emphasised that the single use plastic (SUP) goods have been prohibited from July 2022. Finding affordable and sustainable alternatives to plastic is the need of the hour, according to him. The Chandigarh Municipal Corporation’s unique projects like ‘Back to Basics’, ‘Har gaadi bin, har gaadi bag’, ‘Swachhta ki Pathshala’, etc., to implement the ban on single-use plastics, were discussed by Anindita Mitra, Municipal Corporation of Chandigarh. Ripu Daman Bevli, popularly known as the Plog Man of India, discussed the necessity of first ‘Refusing’ plastic things before ‘Reducing, Reusing, or Recycling’ them.
Anjalli Ravi Kumar, Chief Sustainability Officer of Zomato, and Shubhra Jain, Public Policy – Sustainability Lead, Amazon India, spoke on different measures being carried out by their respective firms as they work to become ‘Plastic Neutral Businesses.’ The industry of managing plastic waste mainly depends on the labour provided by the unorganised sector. Akash Shetti, Plastics for Change, provided insights into the sector. Global businesses can obtain high-quality recycled plastic through supply chains that have been certified as using ocean-bound plastic and fair-trade products, according to the organisation.