Hyderabad: Littered on streets, plastic gloves pose new crisis

HYDERABAD: Single-use plastic gloves being mindlessly discarded on streets and open bins, seem to be doing more harm than good to the already existing problem of plastic pollution in the city and elsewhere.
While this pandemic generated waste is greatly exacerbating the pollution crisis, environmental and medical experts TOI spoke to said addressing the issue of single-use plastic requires the same urgency as the current pandemic, as it poses immediate and long-term risks to global health.
“There is a lot of use and throw practice that has kicked in since March, which was slowly reducing prior to that. Supermarkets and grocery stores are giving out the one-time use and throw plastic for convenience of their customers, but we should remember that convenience cannot be the reason for our irresponsibility,” Arun Krishnamurthy, founder, Environmental Foundation of India, said. “We are generating so much more non-degradable trash in the current context that it is only going to create more problems for us. For instance, if we look at Delhi today, the air quality is also one of the reasons for rise of Covid-19 cases. We should look at our waste issue immediately,” he added.

Though there is a ban on manufacturing products below 50 microns in the state, there is no ban on production of single-use plastic above that grade. In November last year, the state government had appointed a committee to suggest alternatives for single-use plastic items. The committee was appointed to study the problems and asked to suggest alternatives to the single-use plastic items and make suggestions for promoting such industries that produce alternate products in a government order.
Experts say its always better to wear reusable cloth mask and gloves instead of using a surgical or plastic one and discarding them unscientifically.
“People don’t seem to be understanding the gravity of dumping waste in the open,” said Dr V V Ramana Prasad, a pulmonologist at KIMS Hospital.