Vishakapatnam, May 16: The beautiful beaches of Vizag are a scene of plastic litter at day’s end. Polythene bags, styrofoam cups and PET bottles are washed up on the beaches everyday as the Greater Vizag Municipal Corporation (GVMC) struggles to pick them in its lumbering, groaning tippers.
For official purposes, use of polythene bags is banned on Vizag’s beaches. The ban has had almost no impact in the city as shopkeepers continued to hand out commodities to customers in plastic bags.
Few residents refuse to accept plastic carry bags as there is no alternative.
Despite adopting the ban as part of its no-plastic policy, the GVMC, the second largest municipal corporation in the state, failed to start a massive campaign to educate people about the hazards of indiscriminate use of plastic material.
The GVMC’s ban outlaws the use of polythene bags of less than 20 microns thickness by any commercial establishment but a visit to any beach in the evening brings home how ineffective the ban is.
Few of the shops along the beach road stock cloth bags in case an environmentally conscious person comes by.
Consequently plastic waste blocks the drainage of water on the beachfront roads in the city.
Every year, come monsoon time, GVMC squads struggle to clear the plastic morass out of blocked stormwater drains.
Vizag generates some 900 tonnes of solid waste per day. Plastic articles make up a substantial chunk of this waste. Much of this goes down the drain and blocks it all up.
While the GVMC bills the city as the fastest growing city in Asia, its plastic-free policy is primitive in implementation.
One GVMC officer said the corporation is unable to implement the policy as “we are yet to receive machines which measure the thickness of polythene bags.’’
–Agencies