Plastic bags are killers

Here’s a story by K. S. Parthasarathy in Mumbai. He was the former secretary of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board of India. Tarapur, on the West coast of India, has a nuclear power plant. In May 1995, in Tarapur, routine sampling of a storm-water drain at this facility detected a small amount of caesium-137, which was traced to steam condensate from the plant. The leak contaminated an area of about 40 square metres, well within the premises. The radioactivity was so dilute that a person would have had to drink 50 litres of storm water every day for an entire year to exceed the maximum safe dose. And the plant personnel disposed of the affected soil safely. The leak posed no health risk. But the story "grew legs". Dozens of reporters descended on the site. Some attributed the leak to a nuclear power station nearby. In some versions, the leak had killed local cattle. The Times of India, one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country, published photographs of the skeletons of animals said to have been killed by the leak. Angry villagers dragged the carcass of a calf to the site. I was at Tarapur to investigate the leak. During the autopsy, which I requested, the vet pulled out several kilograms of polythene bags from the dead calf's stomach. The body did not contain an abnormally high amount of radioactivity. Stomach clogging by thin plastic bags causes 90 per cent of cattle deaths in parts of India. In one state capital, the authorities keep an ambulance with rescue personnel ready to rush to the spot to do emergency surgery on cattle in distress. They get many calls every day.

Learning from Singapore

Singapore is already one of the world’s cleanest cities because they have laws against littering and they enforce them properly. Look at this squeaky clean street. Wouldn’t you love to have your city look like this? Now the National Environment Agency of Singapore has launched a program to encourage people to use reusable bags instead of plastic bags. They aren’t doing this in any knee-jerk manner like suddenly banning plastic bags without even considering what alternatives people can use. No, they have a planned program, which starts with an educational process for schools, where they are giving away beautifully produced teaching materials to teachers and schools to use. That’s the most effective way to go. Get children to first understand and then spread the message. We are in the reusable bags business because one day my daughter came home from school and banned plastic bags from our home, thanks to one wonderful teacher who made the kids understand how much harm plastic bags are doing. We’ve recently formed a body called the Ecoright Association where the first thing we done is to manufacture a product that is a viable alternative to plastic bags. Because a viable alternative cannot be made at as low a cost as plastic bags, we’ve deployed our marketing, branding and business exposure to evolve a strategy by which people can acquire these alternate bags at a very low cost by involving corporations and brands that understand the benefits they derive from looking like good corporate citizens who contribute to the welfare of society.