In honor of World Environment Day, which is dedicated to raising awareness and enforcing action to protect our environment, we must address the issue of single-use plastic which continues to plague our beautiful landscapes.
As a Bangladeshi, in my childhood, plastic bags were hard to come across as Bangladesh became the first country in the world to ban plastic bags way back in 2002, long before any environmental campaign against it. Rather it was banned after the discovery of drainage systems being clogged as a result of plastic bags which went on to cause ravaging floods. The enforcement of the ban, later on, began to falter, but that is not what this article is dedicated to.
Ever since I found myself in Vietnam, it has been hard not to acknowledge the excessive use of plastic on a daily basis. Everything was packaged and wrapped in layers of various kinds of plastic. Plastic bags were not an uncommon sight for me, from experience in Mozambique, but even in Mozambique, customers are required to pay for them. That acted as somewhat of a deterrent, silently encouraging customers to bring their own bags and effectively reducing plastic usage drastically. This was notably absent here in Vietnam, where plastic bags are commonly offered for free.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, plastic is everywhere, making it very, very difficult to eliminate it from our lives. So over the past year, I was volunteered and collaborated with various organizations to attempt to dent the eventual plastic waste and found myself captivated by the solutions I came across. A group called Plastic People, with whom I volunteered for a while aims to reduce plastic waste by employing a network of local people to bring plastic waste from around the city and then using various machines to turn the waste into beautiful and original furniture. That changed our perspective as a family, leading us to now clean and store all the plastic we use and send it to Plastic People to turn into furniture, essentially placing our net plastic waste at zero.
After trash clean-ups and hours volunteering for Plastic People, I could not help but think that we needed to address this issue at the root, which starts with consumption. I was delighted to find that Ho Chi Minh City has now introduced a master plan to phase out single-use plastic from supermarkets and shopping centers, ahead of its regional peers. If successful, single-use plastic consumption from the city of almost 9 million people will be significantly reduced. Hopefully, this change extends to other parts of the world to one day eliminate single-use plastic.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world”
– Gandhi