Rwanda also has this policy, since 2008, and they enforce it. The country is very clean, it looks different than other African countries (and countries like the US), just because there is no plastic rubbish everywhere. I think this is a very good policy, and would welcome it at home.
There was this scene in Mad Men where Don Draper, Betty Draper and the kids go out for a picnic in the new family car. They eat lunch in a grassy field, then when they're done, they pack up their basket and blanket, leaving the beer cans, food wrappers, empty bottles, plastic cutlery, and chicken bones scattered on the grass.
That scene shocked and horrified me more than all the sexism, racism, and homophobia combined.
Edit: saw the other comments, looks like I wasn't the only one affected by that scene.
I've been told this too. There was a massive anti-littering campaign in the 1950s called "Keep America Beautiful" and it was ironically initiated by the packaging industry[0].
I live and walk along the Charles river and over the last couple of decades Boston and surrounding towns have been actively trying to keep the river and the river walk clean.
Despite all the signs I still have seen people pick up their dogs poop before they pick up their own trash. I literally watched an invidial drop a Twix wrapper while picking up their dogs poop (the fine for not picking up your dog is actually less but there are more signs and I guess stronger culture awareness).
There are signs all over the place not to dump goddam bread into the river or use aggressive fertilizer as this increases runoff and messes up the aquatic wild life.
It's ironic that people will pick up their dog shit because by the middle of summer the swan,geese,duck population is so high from bread dumping that there is bird shit all over the places (walk way). Some of the geese and swans have excrement that is very comparable to the largest dogs.
You still get the problem where pickup trucks are a popular vehicle. It's not intentional (although perhaps from a lack of caring sometimes), but trash thrown in the back simply flies out when cruising down the highway.
It was the "Give a Hoot, don't Pollute" program. Pioneered by Lady Bird Johnson, first Lady. Nobody thought twice about it, until made aware of the issue.
The US National Park Service policy on garbage in the wilderness used to be burning it and burying the remains. It's not uncommon to find old scorched beer cans at some campsites today. They also casually encouraged interacting with animals, including bears.
Parts of the US have this policy (plastic bags), too. I thought I'd dislike it, but then I realized how amazing it was that most plastic rubbish disappeared.
In the specific case of Rwanda, it's also important to realize that the plastic ban, as well as the universally celebrated higher participation of women in administration and politics are also fantastic PR of the regime essentially aimed at the West.
Dictatorial regimes that implement actually beneficial policies I can tolerate. Less good than a democracy in terms of social and political freedom, but better than dictatorships that don't implement any benign policies.
That said my knowledge of African politics is limited to a few news articles a week so I can't form a meaningful opinion about how well or badly countries there are run except in really obvious cases like Zimbabwe.
Note: Thank you for down voting for pointing out a glaring 'fake statistics' and poor journalism, on a #1 trending post on HN.
The first and the second quote do not mean the same thing, not even close.
"A massive 60%t of the plastic waste in the oceans is said to have come from India, according to the Times of India."
The TOI reads - "Banning disposable plastic is a huge step for the capital and the country because India is among the top four biggest plastic polluters in the world, responsible for around 60% of the 8.8 million tons of plastic that is dumped into the world’s oceans every year."
As an Indian, I see a lot of journalists stuck in a colonial era. They go out of their way to tarnish and stereotype the great unwashed. They manage to turn even positive news to mock and heckle the less developed world.
But this article has taken it to great heights. The TOI isn't exactly known for journalistic integrity and often conveniently pulls statistics from their backside. But to misquote the devil, this article has certainly hit the lowest level.
"India, with 0.60 million tonnes per year of mismanaged plastic waste, is ranked 12th. China ranks no. 1 with 8.82 million tonnes per year of mismanaged plastic waste. There are 11 Asian and Southeast Asian countries in the list, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Burma."
>But this article has taken it to great heights. The TOI isn't exactly known for journalistic integrity and often conveniently pulls statistics from their backside. But to misquote the devil, this article has certainly hit the lowest level.
I second this. We should just ban TOI links on hacker news.
I think it might actually be factually incorrect. I looked up the Times Of India article that OP's article was referring to [1], and could not find a source on the biggest plastic polluters in the world.
Then, after searching around, the articles [2] and reports [3] that I found all put Indonesia (not India) in the top 5 polluters in the world. They refer to an authoritative source from Science [4], but I'm not able to access this due to the paywall.
I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. Surely the Times of India hasn't confused "Indonesia" for "India", right?
The article claims - India contributes 60% of the plastic in the ocean.
From the Times of India (TOI) article that it refers to - "India is among the four largest contributor who in total contribute 60%". Which considering a journalist's honesty definitely means India is the fourth largest contributor, which would mean India at most contributes 15% of the waste.
That is a long way from the 60% claimed. Considering the reputation of TOI, even the milder claim is quite suspect.
I do not see any coverage in Indian media. Could it be one of those official notifications which public at large hardly follows but it breeds corruption by enforcement officials. Though looking at Indian papers I came across this rather frightening news:
>The ban has been active in Bangalore since March, 2016 [1] and in Mangalore for much longer [2]
It is not enforced though. I'm living in Bangalore and shopkeepers still give me plastic bags all the time. Banning something, or passing a law is only half the battle; enforcing them is the real issue. And you cannot enforce the laws because corruption is so wide and rampant in India that nothing can be done about it, or so it feels.
That is how India rolls. I am not sure how the poor street food vendors survive if they cant use plastic plates and spoons. If they are forced to use steel plates and spoons that is a health and safety nightmare in India.
There are plenty of cost effective traditional alternatives. Banana leaves, hand made leaf plates, machine made leaf plates, in the worst case paper plates.
Plastics are just convenient and cheap, if the environmental costs are not considered.
You have it backwards... the poor vendors can't afford a stock of disposable plates. They're the ones who give you something into the hand, or on a tin plate. You have to remember what "poor" means there.
>>If they are forced to use steel plates and spoons that is a health and safety nightmare in India.
This is one more of those things which we as current generation kids have grown into.
When I was a kid traditional muslim marriages used glass tumblers in marriage lunches. Which used be rinsed in a common drum by guy who would have barely bathed in a month. I remember we barely used to fall ill in those days. We used to play in mud, eat mangoes plucked from trees, spun out glass sharpened thread for kites, play marbles, eat tamarind from trees and drink from the municipal tap in the playground.
We mixed with dirt and infection is a way our immune systems were trained well.
Today apparently people can't walk across the street without catching cold.
As a anecdote, only recently I visited a house warming ceremony they were only rinsing plates(not washing) after each batch finished eating. To make it worse, people were washing their hands post lunch at the same place they were rinsing. The cafeteria lunch eating sterile programmer in me refused to even eat there. But every other person who was there, including my own family had no problems at all.
It's been quite some time I ate at street vendors there. In past they would invariably have steel plates/spoons and wash after use. I imagine at least in past it was quite cheaper as compare to plastic/paper wares.
one of the road side sweet corn shacks, was giving throwaway steel spoons (thicker and stiffer than aluminium foil, but super thin). It felt weird throwing it in trash.
I think there's been a noticable difference due to this rule. Including change in people's behavior (in using plastic bags)
This is India. Starving, thirsty, injured (hit by cars and trucks) cows and dogs roam the streets, hobbling along, limping along. There are people starving on the street-side. The poorest children are openly prostituted on the streets.
How are they going to enforce a rule regarding plastic bags?
The rich will continue to do whatever they want.
The middle-classes will continue to do whatever they can get away with.
The poor will continue to be shit on and abused.
------------
About 20 years ago they banned smoking in public in Delhi (I was there when they did it).
All that this ordinance did was to give the police yet another angle to harass people. More corruption. More bribes.
Public Smoking ban has been largely effective in India. You rarely see people smoking in public areas. The effectiveness of these laws are that it allows concerned citizens to raise their voice when they see law is being broken.
> it allows concerned citizens to raise their voice when they see law is being broken
How exactly do concerned citizens raise their voice in India? I once saw a stray dog that had been run over by a car licking its wounds, waiting to die. After which it would lay there on the road-side until it had been eaten by birds and insects. I wanted to raise awareness of my various concerns about this. How should I have gone about it? Genuinely interested in learning from you.
An aside: the stoic, pious strength I saw on the dog's face as it licked itself, knowing it was dying, was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen.
Smoking in public seems a bit extreme, but for instance smoking in bars/restaurants was introduced in the country where I lived first in 2006 and tightened in 2011 but a lot of bars still just kept doing it. Especially in small villages. Until some of them were fined; the fines are so high that they basically have to close and have debts after that. Even for 'rich' people this is a too much. Since a few of those were made public, no-one dares to do it anymore. But in public seems ... very hard to enforce.
So one would think, with plastic, just fine the people giving/selling the plastic bags. If you give/sell a non degradable plastic bag it has to carry a return deposit of $25 per bag or you get fined, as a shop, $200k. Plastic bags will be gone in no time flat. Far easier to enforce and too rich, also for the rich. Good for companies and the world as they can sell paper bags and biodegradable bags.
The parent's larger point is apathy. This is very widespread in India, to an extent people don't bother about anything at all until they are personally affected by an issue, by that time they cry victim start blaming governments, neighbors, society et al for not doing enough.
Near my home, people are so deeply into this phenomenon they won't contribute a signature to a list, for a letter of request to fix sanitation, or roads, or a street light. I've even been told by the local Municipal engineer why is that its always me who raises these issues, and if its really so important why don't others speak up. Things came down to a point, when I had to take precautions to fix things for myself. It turns out larger sanitation broke down in a year or two, then all of a sudden my neighbors wanted me to spend all my time working taking off from work to work for them while they relax at home.
We call this 'Chalta hai' attitude in India. Which basically translates to 'works fine for now'.
I'm not from Delhi, but similar ban has been in effect in south India for many years now. Water/soda bottles are not included in the ban, it is usually the shopping bag and eating utensils like cups and plates.
I'm curious to know this as well. It would be cool if they implemented this in the U.S., even if only for the return to dominance of the glass bottle soda.
It interesting in many places in South America glass bottles are the norm, they get sterilized and reused. You see crates of them stacked up outside the kioskos waiting to be picked up. You pay a deposit on the bottle and get a redemption when you return it. This isn't a new development either, its just kind of the way its always been. I am not sure why plastic didn't become as dominant in many of those countries.
I wish that they could find a way to do this in the Islamabad/Rawalpindi area. Due to a lack of budget and government coordination for large scale trash pick up, nearly every stream and ravine in the area is the designated trash dumping grounds. It's thoroughly littered with plastic shopping bags and plastic bottles. It won't solve the problem of people throwing trash on nearly any available piece of unclaimed or unusable land, but at least it'll be paper based or biodegradable.
This is awesome. When I was in India ten years ago, everywhere we went in rural India the trees along creeks, rivers and streams were littered with plastic bags from where floods had deposited them. They were like leaves, and the trees were dead. They had already banned plastic bags locally in that province, and it is good to see a global ban on plastic in general.
In Himachal Pradesh, the plastic bag ban had resulted in a cottage industry forming where discarded newspapers were folded/glued into shopping bags. I'd like to see this same thing happen in the US. A friend imported a palette of these bags to Florida, and he was able to sell them to vendors and make a small profit. This tells me they might be viable here commercially.
Rwanda is a pint-sized dictatorship governed with an iron first. Delhi is a howling cesspit of chaos.
In addition to the obvious enforcement problems in Delhi itself, Delhi is only a small part of the National Capital Region, meaning tons of plastic will flow in from Haryana and UP even if Delhi does manage to clean up its act.
I think one reason could be because Delhi doesn't have it's own border control? But yea I get it, there are lots of things that can be done to enforce it.
Amen to that.
I feel the same whenever I see a news along the lines of "India has banned ${something-that-sounds-nice}".
Indian (and State) govt(s) need to start enforcing what they say.
Readit News
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/15/rwanda...
That scene shocked and horrified me more than all the sexism, racism, and homophobia combined.
Edit: saw the other comments, looks like I wasn't the only one affected by that scene.
[0]http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-...
edit: panic to picnic
Despite all the signs I still have seen people pick up their dogs poop before they pick up their own trash. I literally watched an invidial drop a Twix wrapper while picking up their dogs poop (the fine for not picking up your dog is actually less but there are more signs and I guess stronger culture awareness).
There are signs all over the place not to dump goddam bread into the river or use aggressive fertilizer as this increases runoff and messes up the aquatic wild life.
It's ironic that people will pick up their dog shit because by the middle of summer the swan,geese,duck population is so high from bread dumping that there is bird shit all over the places (walk way). Some of the geese and swans have excrement that is very comparable to the largest dogs.
That said my knowledge of African politics is limited to a few news articles a week so I can't form a meaningful opinion about how well or badly countries there are run except in really obvious cases like Zimbabwe.
Smugglers work on the dark side of Rwanda’s plastic bag ban
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/2/25/rwanda-plast...
The first and the second quote do not mean the same thing, not even close.
"A massive 60%t of the plastic waste in the oceans is said to have come from India, according to the Times of India."
The TOI reads - "Banning disposable plastic is a huge step for the capital and the country because India is among the top four biggest plastic polluters in the world, responsible for around 60% of the 8.8 million tons of plastic that is dumped into the world’s oceans every year."
As an Indian, I see a lot of journalists stuck in a colonial era. They go out of their way to tarnish and stereotype the great unwashed. They manage to turn even positive news to mock and heckle the less developed world.
But this article has taken it to great heights. The TOI isn't exactly known for journalistic integrity and often conveniently pulls statistics from their backside. But to misquote the devil, this article has certainly hit the lowest level.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and- environment/india-pumps-600000-tonnes-of-plastic-waste-into-the-ocean-annually-science-journal/article6890568.ece
I second this. We should just ban TOI links on hacker news.
Then, after searching around, the articles [2] and reports [3] that I found all put Indonesia (not India) in the top 5 polluters in the world. They refer to an authoritative source from Science [4], but I'm not able to access this due to the paywall.
I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. Surely the Times of India hasn't confused "Indonesia" for "India", right?
[1] http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/all-forms-of-disposable...
[2] http://www.audubon.org/news/these-5-countries-are-biggest-pl...
[3] PDF! http://www.oceanconservancy.org/our-work/marine-debris/mckin...
[4] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768
From the Times of India (TOI) article that it refers to - "India is among the four largest contributor who in total contribute 60%". Which considering a journalist's honesty definitely means India is the fourth largest contributor, which would mean India at most contributes 15% of the waste.
That is a long way from the 60% claimed. Considering the reputation of TOI, even the milder claim is quite suspect.
http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/19/theres-horrifying-amount-pl...
DOI: 10.1126/science.1260352
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/pollutio...
I was surprised to learn Delhi did not have such a ban so far
[1] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/Total-plas...
[2] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/mangalore-bans...
It is not enforced though. I'm living in Bangalore and shopkeepers still give me plastic bags all the time. Banning something, or passing a law is only half the battle; enforcing them is the real issue. And you cannot enforce the laws because corruption is so wide and rampant in India that nothing can be done about it, or so it feels.
Plastics are just convenient and cheap, if the environmental costs are not considered.
Edible cutlery http://www.bakeys.com/
This is one more of those things which we as current generation kids have grown into.
When I was a kid traditional muslim marriages used glass tumblers in marriage lunches. Which used be rinsed in a common drum by guy who would have barely bathed in a month. I remember we barely used to fall ill in those days. We used to play in mud, eat mangoes plucked from trees, spun out glass sharpened thread for kites, play marbles, eat tamarind from trees and drink from the municipal tap in the playground.
We mixed with dirt and infection is a way our immune systems were trained well.
Today apparently people can't walk across the street without catching cold.
As a anecdote, only recently I visited a house warming ceremony they were only rinsing plates(not washing) after each batch finished eating. To make it worse, people were washing their hands post lunch at the same place they were rinsing. The cafeteria lunch eating sterile programmer in me refused to even eat there. But every other person who was there, including my own family had no problems at all.
Its just a frame of mind.
I think there's been a noticable difference due to this rule. Including change in people's behavior (in using plastic bags)
Dead Comment
How are they going to enforce a rule regarding plastic bags?
The rich will continue to do whatever they want.
The middle-classes will continue to do whatever they can get away with.
The poor will continue to be shit on and abused.
------------
About 20 years ago they banned smoking in public in Delhi (I was there when they did it).
All that this ordinance did was to give the police yet another angle to harass people. More corruption. More bribes.
How exactly do concerned citizens raise their voice in India? I once saw a stray dog that had been run over by a car licking its wounds, waiting to die. After which it would lay there on the road-side until it had been eaten by birds and insects. I wanted to raise awareness of my various concerns about this. How should I have gone about it? Genuinely interested in learning from you.
An aside: the stoic, pious strength I saw on the dog's face as it licked itself, knowing it was dying, was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen.
So one would think, with plastic, just fine the people giving/selling the plastic bags. If you give/sell a non degradable plastic bag it has to carry a return deposit of $25 per bag or you get fined, as a shop, $200k. Plastic bags will be gone in no time flat. Far easier to enforce and too rich, also for the rich. Good for companies and the world as they can sell paper bags and biodegradable bags.
There are starving, thirsty people in every major city in the US.
This has nothing to do with enforcing ban on plastics.
Near my home, people are so deeply into this phenomenon they won't contribute a signature to a list, for a letter of request to fix sanitation, or roads, or a street light. I've even been told by the local Municipal engineer why is that its always me who raises these issues, and if its really so important why don't others speak up. Things came down to a point, when I had to take precautions to fix things for myself. It turns out larger sanitation broke down in a year or two, then all of a sudden my neighbors wanted me to spend all my time working taking off from work to work for them while they relax at home.
We call this 'Chalta hai' attitude in India. Which basically translates to 'works fine for now'.
"The ban took effect on the first day of 2017."
What are the vendors doing? Is water being sold in glass bottles with a deposit scheme for redemption now?
In Himachal Pradesh, the plastic bag ban had resulted in a cottage industry forming where discarded newspapers were folded/glued into shopping bags. I'd like to see this same thing happen in the US. A friend imported a palette of these bags to Florida, and he was able to sell them to vendors and make a small profit. This tells me they might be viable here commercially.
As they say, reduce > re-use > recycle.
Deleted Comment
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/15/rwanda...
In addition to the obvious enforcement problems in Delhi itself, Delhi is only a small part of the National Capital Region, meaning tons of plastic will flow in from Haryana and UP even if Delhi does manage to clean up its act.
Deleted Comment