Amul Vasudevan, a vegetable hawker in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, thought she was going to go out of business.
The state had forbidden retailers to use disposable plastic bags, which were critical for her livelihood because they were so cheap. She could not afford to switch to selling her wares in reusable cloth bags.
Tamil Nadu was not the first state in India to try to curtail plastic pollution, but unlike others, it was relentless in enforcing its law. Vasudevan was fined repeatedly for using throwaway bags.
Now, three years after the ban took effect, Vasudevan’s use of plastic bags has decreased by more than two-thirds; most of her customers bring cloth bags. Many streets in this state of more than 80 million people are largely free of plastic waste.
Yet Tamil Nadu’s ban is far from an absolute success. Many people still defy it, finding the alternatives to plastic either too expensive or too inconvenient. The state’s experience offers lessons for the rest of India, where an ambitious countrywide ban on making, importing, selling and using some single-use plastic took effect this month.
“Plastic bags can only be eliminated if the customer decides it, not the seller,” Vasudevan said from her stall on Muthu Street in Chennai, the state capital. “Getting rid of it is a slow process; it can’t happen overnight.”
Across India’s metropolises and villages, daily life is intertwined with disposable plastic, considered one of the worst environmental hazards. Shopping of all sorts is carried home in throwaway bags, and food is served on single-use dishes and trays. The country is the world’s third-biggest producer of disposable plastic waste, after China and the United States.
But now Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has banned some of those ubiquitous items, including disposable cups, plates, cutlery, straws and ear swabs. Single-use bags are forbidden, but thicker, reusable ones are allowed. The ban does not include soda bottles and plastic packaging for chips and other snacks.
India follows places such as Bangladesh, the EU and China in a large-scale effort to reduce plastic waste. But its plan is among the most ambitious, experts said, as it targets the entire supply chain, from the making to the use of disposable plastics.
What remains to be seen is how committed authorities will be to enforcing the new law.
“A blanket ban is very difficult to implement unless local governments take strict actions against the violators and build partnership with people,” said Ravi Agarwal, who heads Toxics Link, an advocacy group that focuses on waste management. “Otherwise we will end up with some sporadic fines here and there, and some newspaper reports.”
Last year, the federal government banned very thin plastic bags, but enforcement, left to local authorities, was not stringent. Enforcing the new law is also up to local authorities, but now the government says it will involve the public, who will be able to report violators and their locations with an app.
Public pressure on politicians — to fix drain and sewage blockages caused by plastic, for example — is another key reason for the relative success in Tamil Nadu.
On a recent Friday morning, plainclothes police officers milled about Muthu Street, hunting for perpetrators. Near a section of hawkers selling vegetables and jasmine flowers, they found a street vendor bagging up produce for customers in disposable bags. Police fined that vendor and proceeded to seize dozens of pounds of the contraband from others, fining them and threatening them with prison.
Since December 2019, authorities in the state have collected more than $1.3 million in fines; the smallest is about $7. But the job is never-ending — after the officers dispersed that day on Muthu Street, some vendors resumed using the banned bags. - New York Times
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