Plastic Waste: A Growing Environmental Concern

If you think plastic pollution is a issue to the city people then it will continue destroying our society. Many visitors love to travel from one place to another. They have to face plastic pollution almost everywhere; city to rural areas. There are no enough steps to stop plastic pollution and save our community and future generation.

This winter, my travels have taken me through several sub-districts in the country’s south and south east with one of my friends. However, as a development worker, I have noticed one troubling thing everywhere: Plastic litter. Thin plastic bags, food wrappers, single-use bottles, and other debris scattered around everywhere in the bazaars, junctions, towns, suburbs, and even around people’s homes.

If you visit countryside bazaars, towns and junctions while mindful of environmental concerns, the first thing you’ll notice is scattered plastic waste. These plastic wastes are so pervasive that they are silently eating up our rural landscapes, but this often remains out of our attention and discussion.

Plastic pollution is one of the rapidly growing environmental threats worldwide. In our country as well, it is posing a serious threat to our healthy living which is being talked about frequently by the state ministers, civil society, and think tanks. Newspapers often publish news and articles addressing the issue. But most of our discussions often focused on plastic pollution in the city and urban areas as if it is only a problem there.

But the fact is that plastic pollution is no longer an urban and city crisis alone, it is a growing threat in the rural areas as well. The towns are drowning in waste and losing their natural beauty because of the plastic litter.

This is now a serious threat to the viability of our rural eco-system and the sustainability of the rural communities but people in the rural areas are not aware of this silent threat. People in the countryside now do not carry cane-made baskets as they used to do while going to the bazaar. People now find the plastic bags convenient to carry things. As the plastic bags are often given free with purchases, then who cares about carrying a bag from home.

In my recent observations, rural people do not use less single-use plastics and polythene bags than those in the cities and on top of that they have almost no sense of the environmental threat these plastic items are posing. Interestingly sometimes it becomes difficult to see the roadside small grocery shops in the rural areas because of the hanging packages of the chips, dhalbaza and jhalmuri and other food items.

In the urban setting, the situation is not much different. Though not very effective, there are waste collection and management systems and particular dumping areas in the cities. To me, there appears to be a growing public awareness in the city centres and big towns. But in the rural areas, there is no waste collection and management system, and as plastic items are not biodegradable, they keep piling up around bazaars, towns, homes, and roadsides. Gradually these plastic items affect the rural ecosystems and exacerbate climate impacts and biodiversity loss.

According to UNEP, globally one trillion plastic bags are produced per year and around million plastic bags are used every minute. This is a global concern and a lot is being discussed on how to reduce the production of single-use plastic and finding alternatives to it.

Regarding Bangladesh’s plastic waste production, all the statistics are shocking. We are one of the top countries that mismanage plastic waste. Our per capita use of plastic is soaring every year as our economy grows. We generate around 3,000 tons of plastic waste every day.