As my composting bins were running out of space, I was searching for compostable bin bags to put and dispose off my kitchen wastes when I came across this bin bag claiming to be eco-friendly. This got me thinking as to how can a 40 micron bin bag eco-friendly?
A 40 micron plastic bag means it’s a thicker and stronger plastic bag which is reusable but nonetheless plastic. And who reuses a bin bag anyway? So, either the bin bag will be recycled if the municipal SWM system has the means to segregate and recycle the plastic or it’ll end up in the landfill where it’ll remain un-decomposed and reduce to micro plastics eventually.
Having said that, it is as much our responsibility as the municipalities or the public health authorities to take control of the waste we generate, maybe more. The lesser waste we generate, the lesser the burden on the municipalities. So we need to learn to refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle when it comes to waste generation.
However, I agree it’s easier said than done. While the kitchen and/or garden waste can be easily taken care off by composting at household levels, it’s the dry wastes, more specifically the plastic wastes (from food packaging/other packaging) that are a cause of concern. No matter how much we try to refuse/reduce the packaging wastes, it cannot be completely reduced to zero unless the food/spice packaging brands develop an alternate way of decomposable packaging or develop a circular economy of collecting their packings and recycling them. While we wait for the aforementioned things to happen, we can try in our ways to reuse/recycle our plastic wastes or donate our wastes to people or organisations that can make eco-friendly use of them. For the latter, we can find people/organisations/businesses (@praacheenvidhaan, @ecokaari) working in that direction to help save the earth choking with our plastic wastes.
I’m going to send my plastic wastes to @ecokaari so that they can transform them into something beautiful. How about you?
If you know of any such people/organisations working in this direction please tag them here..
