India | A trio of unlikely heroes wages war on plastic

Ram Nath, 40, sorts reusable trash he fished out from Yamuna, India’s sacred river that flows through New Delhi

For more than 25 years, Ram Nath has lived on the banks of the Yamuna River under a 19th-century iron bridge. Each morning, the wiry man walks a few steps from his makeshift hut and enters the black, sludgy waters of one of India’s most polluted rivers. He is fishing for trash.

“This is the only work we have,” said the 40-year- old, sorting through a pile of plastic bottles, bags, and cast-off electronics.

Hundreds of garbage collectors live on the Yamuna’s banks in New Delhi, making USD2 to $4 per day recycling plastic waste collected from the river. While Nath doesn’t think of himself as an environmentalist, he is one of a handful of New Delhi residents waging war against the tsunami of plastic threatening to swamp India. They include a 9th-grade student who convinces posh restaurants to give up plastic straws and a businessman whose company makes plates and bowls from palm leaves.

India, which hosts U.N. World Environment Day on June 5, can use all the help it can get. This year’s theme is “Beat Plastic Pollution.”

With more than 15 million people, New Delhi and its surrounding cities produce an estimated 17,000 tons of trash daily, according to Indian officials and environmentalists. That requires immense dumps, hills of stinking trash that measure up to 50 meters tall. Last year, two people were killed when a large part of one of the city’s dumps crashed down onto them.

“All these products which we use because of convenience take many hundreds of years” to even partially decompose, said Chitra Mukherjee, an environmental expert and head of operations at Chintan.

Mukherjee, who has spent years raising awareness and creating localized efforts to curb plastic pollution credits the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government for making waste management and pollution a more serious issue.

“It is a collaborative effort between not only bureaucrats, but researchers, environmentalists who have been brought on board to make some progressive policies,” she said. AP