ENVIRO-CONCERN How many bottles of water, soft drinks and juice have you stocked your fridge with now that it’s getting extremely hot? It’s become a natural part of summer to stock up on refreshments that come, readymade, from a bottle. But what will you do with the bottles once you’ve quenched your thirst?
Our plastic cycle – Down-cycling
You have a couple of options. One is reusing them, but research indicates that these bottles are not made to be safe for reuse. The responsible options would include sorting them into clear and coloured bottles – Sprite would normally be coloured, while Pepsi would be clear – and drop them off at a dumpster. Of course, you could also sell them, but rag-pickers scour through dumpsters to find these bottles that form a part of their living.
From there, it goes to shopkeepers, who will pay the rag-pickers anywhere from Rs. 10 to Rs. 25 per kilogram of plastic bottles. They sell them to wholesalers. Sometimes these wholesalers break the bottles down – something called flaking. Then they sell the flakes. Another option is for them to crush the bottles and sell them in bales. Flakes are mostly recycled to make polyester fibre used as fillers. They can also be used to make thermosetting resins or straps.
There are also processes by which they can be recycled into new bottles, if the original bottles are of the right specifications – but this is a much more extensive process. Down-cycling – from bottles in which edible things can be stored into products you wouldn’t want anywhere near your food, for instance – is much more common. These flakes, if they escape into the water system, cause harm to aquatic life – and us.
Burning or burying – a no-win situation
Some of the bottles and related plastic waste slip through the many considerable gaps in this system. If you just throw it anywhere you find convenient for the moment, it could go into one of the covered gutters and block drains. May get tossed around until they get to the point where it joins a water body – a lake, river or the sea that you just contributed to polluting.
Some of it stays in the soil, where it will remain for a very long time and endanger lives of animals, as well as poisoning the soil over a long period. Plastic is notorious for its inability to break down and integrate with nature without considerable help. Much of it ends up in landfills.
A lot of it also ends up being incinerated, a process that releases a lot of extremely toxic chemicals into the environment. If you’ve ever lit a bonfire into which a plastic bit accidentally made its way, you’re likely to remember how you coughed. A class of 75 chemicals called dioxins could be responsible for that. It’s not just bad for the environment. The toxins get into the soil and can seep into our groundwater, which ends up poisoning us. This is one of the reasons why we consider groundwater too impure to drink.
Recycling isn’t as peachy as it sounds
The process of recycling these bottles is, ironically, also harmful to the environment. The process can use both harmful chemicals as well as need high heat, which can release the same kind of toxins released while incinerating it. It is, however, much less harmful than the process of making virgin plastic. We have quite a few recycling centres (3,500 formal ones, over 4000 informal ones) in India.
They’re a significant source of employment – directly or indirectly, ‘employees’ of this sector number about 1.6 million people according to the Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology.
Plastic bottles of different grades from developed countries like the US and parts of EU are sent to recycling centres in countries like India and China – outsourcing. Of course, this raises the question of safety of both workers and the contamination to our environment. If it’s not safe enough to be recycled in the US or UK, why should it be fine for us to use the same processes in our country?
Varying numbers: dramatic improvement or just gaps in the system?
The numbers as far as how much plastic in India, especially PET bottles, is recycled varies. The latest figures indicate that about 60% of plastic waste ends up getting recycled, for better or for worse. It still leaves over 6000 tonnes to clog drains, pollute oceans and poison our air, water and soil.
But per capita consumption of plastic is expected to keep rising extremely drastically, so we need measures: better ways of recycling plastic, and a shift towards more reusable products in the case of bottles, and biodegradable products in the case of packaging.
However, numbers from a year ago indicated that the highest rate of recycling of plastics in the country was from Gujarat, and even they only managed to recycle about 10%. There has either been phenomenal improvement or there are gaps in numbers.
Production of plastic is a huge industry in India, which will be hit if there is a shift towards more sustainable products to be used in its stead. As of 2013, the industry declared a growth of 12 to 15 percent per annum. They also indicated that they’d support a shift to the production of biodegradable plastic, most of which in India is currently imported.
Apart from the problem of what to do with that bottle of fizzy drink or cold water once you’re done with it, there’s the fact that making virgin plastic is not a sustainable process. To have an idea of how much of our natural resource goes into the making of one bottle, imagine that a quarter of that bottle is full of crude oil. That’s the cost of making it which is more tangible than any currency.
On the whole, the inconvenience of carrying a bottle – either of some other material or a grade of plastic safe for reuse – with you, to refill and drink to your heart’s content, is a more reasonable price for a bottle of refreshing drink. After all, the fizzy stuff isn’t doing your health any favours, either.
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