An elucidation on plastic pollution and its perilous effects
When the vegetable vendor gives you your carrots and potatoes in a plastic bag, you do not protest. A part of your conscience does get bothered but you silence it. What difference does it make, after all? Once you are home and the vegetables have been duly put inside the refrigerator, the polythene becomes useless and you chuck it into the bin, where it belongs.
You might have got rid of the plastic but its journey is far from over. From your dustbin, it reaches the colony’s bins and from there, the waste truck picks it up, only to dump it in a landfill which is, coincidentally, located next to a river. Now obviously, the river is not some pure, clean water source; its location is to blame. The “discarded” plastic bag lying on the landfill is blown by a particularly strong gust of air and whoosh: it finds itself floating on the river, along with several other products that have been deemed of no use.
Now the scene shifts a few metres below the river surface. A school of fish has made that area of the river its home; it’s relatively pollutant-free and they’re safe from the prying fisherman and all other forms of danger- or so they feel.
One particularly adventurous fish gets bored of its mundane existence and decides to explore. What is the fun in staying put where you live and not venturing out, right? So, after casting furtive glances at its busy companions, it flaps its fins and swiftly “ventures out”. After an upward descent of about a metre or two, it sees a whitish object some distance above it. What is it? A fish like itself? Or maybe, it is food?
Tempted, it swims further and gently nudges the object of its curiosity. Nope, it doesn’t move on its own accord; it isn’t living. So the fish does what it finds sensible; it tries to engulf the object, never mind its size. It doesn’t know that what it is assuming to be food is plastic; it has no clue that it is endangering itself. No sooner does the object enter its mouth, than it is overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation. Bewildered and scared, the fish tries to get the object out of its mouth, tries to gurgle and alert its friends. In vain does it try to escape.
Life slowly ebbs out of its struggling body. It squirms, it fidgets, but to no avail. The plastic finally reaches its gills and checkmate. The fish chokes to death.
Weird, huh? We rejected our conscience’s pleas and used a seemingly harmless plastic bag and it ended up killing another living being. The inanimate object which we held in our hands, took the life of a creature which dared to hold it in its mouth.
We might be evolved, powerful, cunning, but are we really humane?
Rejecting single-use plastic might seem to be irrelevant, it might be inconvenient, it might not have an immediate impact on us but hey, it surely affects other life forms and thus, inevitably, us humans.
It isn’t as if alternatives do not exist. Use jute bags or cloth bags. We have a choice. We can choose not to be dependent on plastic and thus, choose to be a little wiser, a little kinder, a little better.
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