Affordable plastic goods made life better in India, but the pileup of plastic waste outpaced the nation’s ability to contain it
, the efforts to solve the mounting crisis have been numerous, imaginative—and insufficient. By 2040, the amount of plastic flowing annually into the sea is forecast nearly to triple, to 32 million tons a year. That means by the time a baby born this year graduates from high school, there will be, on average, a hundred pounds of plastic trash for every yard of coastline around the globe.
Fisherman Babu Sahni, 30, and his son Himanshu Kumar Sahni, eight, approach a bank on the Punpun River, a Ganges tributary. Throughout rural India, trash collection is rare, and ad hoc dump sites like this one are common. Most plastic waste in the ocean gets there by washing off the land.
Sadly, the Ganges also has long been one of the world’s most polluted rivers, befouled by poisonous effluents from hundreds of factories, some dating to the British colonial period. The factories add arsenic, chromium, mercury, and other metals to the hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that still flow in daily. Plastic waste is only the most recent insult.India's lack of regular waste collection leaves plastic to accumulate in and along the waterway.
The fisherman I had come to see was asleep, so I climbed over the berm, still covered with sandbags, and sat on the ghat—the steps down to the river—watching people go about their morning chores. Five women crouched on the bottom step and washed clothes in the murky water. Several men arrived to bathe. Each emptied shampoo from a plastic sachet before discarding it in the river. When the men had finished, they offered water back to Ganga in cupped, uplifted hands.
In nearly every nation struggling to contain plastic waste, the problem is primarily packaging, most of which is discarded immediately after use. Globally, it accounts for 36 percent of the nearly 500 million tons of plastic manufactured annually. India’s problem has less to do with per capita consumption than lack of adequate waste collection.
“That’s not an easy thing to fix. If you are replacing the river with a waste management system that is equivalent, that becomes quite significant in terms of cost.”Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.: People in the Ganges Basin use stairways such as the Chandi Ghat in Haridwar to reach the river for a dip in what they see as purifying waters.
Slat came to fame as a teenager, when he announced a grand plan to sweep up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of loose marine debris, much of it plastic, that swirls around the North Pacific. He raised $30 million and launched his contraption: a floating, 2,000-foot-long, U-shaped boom that skims waste from surface waters.
“It’s good that the interest in it is strong, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle,” he said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to clean up the oceans by tackling one river at a time. It needs to go hand in hand with policy changes and behavior changes as well.” Celebrants transport a likeness of the goddess Durga through the streets of Howrah, near Kolkata, during the Durga Puja festival. It ends with the immersion of the idols in the local river—the Hooghly in this case. Hindu rituals often involve offerings to the Ganges or its branches. Plastic is banned now in many temples.Last October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched phase two of his “Clean India” campaign.
Since 2016 the Indian government has been working on new regulations that would require producers of plastic packaging to take responsibility for the cost of collecting and recycling their disposable products. Similar regulations, known as extended producer responsibility, or EPR, have helped curb plastic waste in the European Union since the mid-1990s. In the U.S., the plastics industry has opposed national legislation. Only Maine and Oregon have passed laws requiring EPR for plastic packaging.
In India too, the calls for action have become more urgent and widespread. Brajesh Kumar Dubey, an environmental engineering professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, told me he was surprised, as he traveled the Ganges Basin on the National Geographic expedition, to meet so many “small islands of people” working to raise awareness about environmental issues. But then, his country has changed so much, and developed so fast, in the past 30 years.
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