Dealing with Plastic Men
Suppose! ‘There is a person called ‘Plastic Man’ who starts to live in the district where you are the District Magistrate’. I put this question to my class in the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. I elaborated and said that the person has the strange habit of buying plastic sheets from the neighbouring district! Then he cuts it into small unusable bits! He then carries this bag of small bits of plastic and randomly litters in urban and rural areas of the district!! Predictably, after a class of acting against public nuisance in which the famed Ratlam Municipality case of the Krishna Iyer era was discussed, all of them responded that the person would be proceeded against under Section 133 of Cr.PC. There was one officer trainee who had a different idea!
She was of the view that the person is evidently mentally deranged and needs medical help. I was, perhaps, prepared for this and I asked them to respond to another scenario. I asked them if the Plastic Man was doing this not just as a freak enterprise but as a commercial activity in which by administering something unhealthy to people and in this coursemaking them do the littering, what would they do. I added that Plastic Man was actually making money and quite a lot of it! This time the class was more convinced that this was indeed a deleterious public nuisance and that action could be contemplated against Plastic Man under other legal provisions as well.
I followed up with a question as to why we (they) are not acting against a popular brand of chocolate for following a trade in which it gets plastic thrown all around and in the process contributes quite a bit of negativity to the health of the society as well. I left the question unanswered as I do not have an answer myself! An officer trainee tried to suggest that once the chocolate has been bought, it becomes the property of the buyer and that it becomes the responsibility of the buyer not to litter. I agree that there is a responsibility for each of us to the greater collectivity of our society not to litter. But I feel that we should not miss out on the chance to fix more responsibility on the corporations to put in a solution for the mess they are helping to create.
The key issue is that we are trained to think that the chocolate company is selling chocolate and that the noodles company is selling noodles. I would argue that they are also selling the convenience of having it in a plastic cover and the convenience of making it available at distant locations and the convenience of the cover being amenable to be carried to even distant locations- the many trek routes around Mussoorie bears witness to this plastic with mark of reputed companies lying around in the solitude of the mountains. This is an externality and it needs to have a solution which is the responsibility of the corporation. “When you sell the convenience of a pouch, be responsible to get it back”.
How do we do this? Do I ask the CEO of that favouritebrand of my daughter (she loves chocolates) to trek up to the mountains and pick up his stuff or does he go into each and every village to pick up the garbage that is a bye product of his business. I want to! But then that won’t be practical.
What I suggest is this : Each of these companies who are into the business of selling plastic bits should be asked by the society to set up a ‘bring back mechanism’ for the covers that they use. Each of their products should be uniquely identified and there should be a monitoring mechanism to ensure that all of their covers come back to them or to a responsible location where it will be disposed off (recycled) in a responsible manner. For this they could put a premium on their product and pay back their customer or the good samaritan who brings back the plastic cover to a responsible location. So the bottle of water which is today available for 15 Rupees would be priced at 65 Rupees and when the bottle is returned to the company (which took the Rs. 65) would be forced to pay Rs. 50/- to whoever isbringing it back to the company or an authorized location set up by the local bodies. Since there is a buy back promised by the company or the consortium of all ‘plastic men’ there would be an incentive to pick up the litter and give it back to the one who brought the plastic into the society by doing a business in it.
This is no new idea. In my childhood, I remember an old lady who used to come to my house every month to collect the packets of ‘Milma milk’. She would pay some money to the maid at home who was careful to store all the plastic packets in which milk came into one house. Presumably, the lady would have been getting something from Milma or someone for the covers which was more than what she was paying the maid. The regulation needs to set up a market mechanism by mandating the Polluter Pay principle.
This would have the impact of reducing the sale of the unhealthy food as there is now a price hike in that. That is not a bad bargain either. This would be one reason why this might not get done immediately as there is a difference between 15 and 65 minus 50. It is for the society to decide as to how we set up systems in which we do not come up our streets with plastic. There is a lot of vested interest that we will have to negotiate with! No wonder the wrapper of the chocolate is not as sweet as the chocolate!
