Bangladesh was already struggling with poor plastic waste management even before the coronavirus pandemic hit the developing nation.
Now, due to fresh concerns related to hygiene during Covid-19, the tide seems to be shifting toward single-use plastics.
Booming tea stalls businesses are using hundreds of thousands of plastic cups every day in Khulna, reports this correspondent after visiting the plastic wholesale market at Boro Bazar.
Brajendranath Sana, a plastic cup wholesaler at Boro Bazar, said there are 7-8 wholesale traders of plastic cups in Khulna and they each supplied retailers with around 100,000 plastic cups every day.
Unfortunately, because after their single-use purpose they are dumped carelessly, with most of them ending up in drains and sewers, it is responsible for waterlogging problems throughout the district.
Mamun Hossain, a tea-seller in Daulatpur, said: “There are two types of disposable tea cups in the market—plastic and paper. Each paper cup has a retail price of Tk1, whereas 100 plastic cups cost Tk75-85 in retail price and are even cheaper in wholesale price. Plastic cups are high in demand among tea-sellers for being cheap, but paper cups are better for the environment as they as decomposable.”
“Single-use plastic tea cups can have severe harmful implications to the environment once they make their way to rivers and oceans. Once water is contaminated, it is difficult, costly and often impossible to remove the pollutants. We know that it can take up to 1,000 years for a single plastic bottle to decompose in water, not to mention the harmful chemicals in plastic contributing to bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases,” said Adv Kudrote E Khoda, Khulna divisional committee secretary of Sushasoner Jonno Nagorik (SUJAN), an NGO that advocates good governance.
“Initiatives need to be taken now to ban the production and use of plastic cups and at the same time, people need to be made aware of the single-use coffee cups made from paper as an alternative,” he added.
Mahfuzur Rahman Mukul, Khulna divisional coordinator of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), said: “Plastic is also full of hazardous chemicals that can migrate into the items we consume. More importantly, large-scale plastic production increases carbon emissions which may bring about extreme weather, including droughts, severe storms and calamitous wildfires.”
“People do not have to choose one crisis over another. The plastic pollution and climate crises are much more long-term threats to our health, wealth and environmental sustainability than the Covid-19 crisis,” he added.
Khulna City Corporation’s Chief Waste Management Officer AH Aziz said: “Single-use plastic cups discarded carelessly and left to flutter around the environment pose the bigger threat to public health, not to mention generating even more plastic pollution.”
