On "World Environment Day", on June 5 this year, the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) put an advertisement in two leading national dailies, (The Times of India and The Hindu). The advertisement presented plastics as a solution to large scale deforestation and that stated there is a need to use plastic so that 20 million trees matured over 10 years could be saved from being used for packaging. Environmentalists are angry and assert that GAIL, a public sector organisation, has no right to squander public money by bringing out such a misleading advertisement.

Bharti Chaturvedi of Chintan, a non-governmental organisation working with rag pickers in Delhi, questions the tactics of the plastic industry and how GAIL was limiting the use-more-plastic argument only to polybags. However, Chaturvedi says plastics are not limited to only packaging.

Plastics have not only sought to replace forest products like paper (usually wood pulp-based), but also several other products providing the poor with their handicrafts livelihoods, such as earthen surahis, coir mats, coir ropes and several other products.

Sudarshan Rodriguez of Reef Watch Marine Conservation says, "Plastic entanglements are killing up to 40,000 seals a year resulting to a four to six per cent drop in seal population. Animals like sea turtles and sea birds drown or strangle from getting tangled and even die from eating discarded plastics and other garbage. Balloons have been the cause of death of animals like sperm whales.”

Dr Asad Rahmani, Director Bombay Natural History Society wonders how GAIL intends to dispose off plastics and control the highly poisonous dioxins. "It is well known," says Dr Rahamani, "that trees are especially being farmed to feed the paper mills. Bamboo too is a renewable source for paper production. While deforestation is reversible, the damage caused by plastics is permanent. It takes thousands of years for plastic to degrade and till then the damage continues."

Rodriguez explains that the disposal of plastics is a problem the world over. There is no safe method to destroy the material. Incineration, or burning, propagated by the plastic industry produces dioxins. Dioxins are carcinogenic and are among the most lethal synthetic chemicals known today. Dioxins dissolve easily in fats and as a result, can build up in the fatty tissues of animals or humans. Globally, more than 6,50,000 plastic bottles are dumped into the oceans each day. It is estimated that a total of
around 6.4 million tonnes of marine litter (mostly plastics) are dumped into the oceans worldwide each year.

On the contrary, Sandeep Gupta, a chemical engineering from IIT-Kharagpur working in a MNC says, "Use of plastic or polymers in daily life like fittings, furniture and containers, directly influences  consumption of tree-based products like pulp and paper". He asserts, "The main culprit is the plastic bag and governments should ban it. America today is greener than before, although its per capita plastic usage is 15 times more than ours! The reason is that the country has made use of polymers responsibly."

What GAIL and others propagating use of plastics forget, says Chaturvedi, is that the plastic bag and restricting protests to anit-polybag campaigns are basically an eyewash. Plastic waste disposal is a problem with no solutions.