Plastic prattle

Many a scourge has tormented the earthlings over centuries taking toll of lives in numbers hard to determine. As if adding insult to injury, the human species has not lagged behind to hurt themselves in small measure by fighting wars for pride and gain, as recorded in history. Neither occurrence of afflictions nor wars is showing signs of abating, exposing frailty of mankind on many fronts, particularly diminishing wisdom and preparedness to be wary of both phenomena even as new knowledge is emerging as well as science and technology are witnessing advances at unprecedented pace and scale. While some afflictions such as smallpox and polio have been kept in check globally, others such as cancer, tuberculosis, malaria and diabetes have held sway in virtually all regions across the earth. Plague, once a dreaded affliction and not happening in modern times like in the 19th century, occurring in India during a few months in 1994, may have faded from public memory, but the message of safeguarding sanitation without any let up in living spaces cannot be disregarded.

Scientists who have been sparing no efforts to find methods and means of remedying the plethora of diseases tormenting human, animal and plant species no end have also, unwittingly though, created a virtual Frankenstein familiar to everyone everywhere in the world as plastic, a later avatar of the world’s first fully synthetic material of the same name, invented in New York by Leo Baekeland, which came to be known as bakelite. The technical adjective plastic, capable of being moulded into any desired shape, has earned it the status of a demon.

Mysuru, described for long as a peaceful city of residents holding on to their laid-back nature, suddenly got drawn into the whirl of panic-ridden debates all over the country on containing the plastic menace, given the unprecedented share of the impossible-to-get-rid-of plastic shopping bags, plates, cups, spoons, trays and what have you, piling up into horrendous mass of garbage all over the urban spaces. Researchers in the West have revealed that humans have generated more than 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastics over the past five decades since the arrival of the most convenient but offending stuff. Closer home, plastic debris is said to have a 60 per cent share in the undisposed garbage created across the State.

While we don’t hear about what is currently happening to plastic-the-demon in western countries, administration in the civic body of Mysuru is going hammer and tongs as it were in arresting the wild march of plastic, although in fits and jerks. The present scenario of using and giving up plastic carry bags in Mysuru can best be described as plastic prattle. It may not be much different elsewhere in the land.