Incentivisation of consumers guarantee to end plastic pollution: Sherry Rehman

ISLAMABAD – Federal Minister for Climate Change, Senator Sherry Rehman on Thursday said incentivisation of consumers was guarantee to end single-time use plastics pollution as South Asian states owing to their large population sizes could not ensure large scale policing and penalisation.

Addressing the inaugural session of the high-level national consultative event: “Plastic Free Rivers and Seas for South Asia Initiative” of the Ministry of Climate Change jointly organised by South Asia Cooperative Environment Programme (SACEP), the Minister said plastic pollution was totally a capacity issue.

Senator Sherry Rehman said the plastic bags pollution was a complex issues that needed public’s stakeholder ownership to meet the task of shunning its overwhelming use in our day to day life business.

“There needs to be some incentive for the consumers at the end to change their habits of using plastics as there is going to be no shift in the public attitude despite all efforts of strict enforcement and prohibitions.”

The Minister stated that the country generated a total of 26% of plastic waste and there were baseline studies that claimed out of which 4% was recycled.

She quoted the World Bank study claiming that by 2050 there would be more plastics in oceans than marine life and Pakistan’s oceans and rivers would be the most exposed to plastic waste.

Senator Sherry Rehman also mentioned that a project was underway for cleaning up of Indus River’s banks and the Ministry was also developing partnership with coca-cola to clean up Malir River.

She reminded that all plastics were not polluting and also all of it was not recyclable whereas the entire narrative and science had to be simplified for the public that they were ingesting plastics in the form of the fish consuming plastics from rivers and oceans.

“We have done it by our anthropogenic activities. Our nutritious cycle is polluted where every food item on way or the other has plastic contamination.”

Shedding light on the solutions to the plastic problem, she said the executive action was governance and the country had to focus with a nuance level approach to think the remedy keeping in view the poor and weak households unable to adopt alternatives.

South Asian economies, she said thrived on plastics and why was it so because the alternatives were expensive. However, it was not easy to make that transition for an upper income household even, she added.

“What a poor household will do who are not even getting community pumps to have water in flood areas like Balochistan?” the Minister queried.

In Sindh and Balochistan there was water everywhere but not a drop to drink because it was not drinkable, she added.

“The environment and climate change has not been part of public dialogue in South Asia including Pakistan. The populists all over the world also deny climate science which is problematic.”

She urged the climate technocrats to think how the poor thinks to end plastic pollution and provide them an affordable solution and a circular economy that would benefit them. “It requires a vast culture of education and values to change as moving away from plastic bags is easier to shift from disposable water bottles.”

“The tourists littering in mountainous areas should be penalized heavily and it is absolutely unacceptable. Littering in the rivers can be and should be penalized and our provinces should join hands in this regard.”

The minister announced that the Ministry was going to prepare the national action plan on plastics. “These interventions needed scale as we are running out of time as governments and economies. Pakistan is facing the largest natural calamity of the century with no precedent of 33 million masses affected in a single natural calamity. Some 15 million or more people will be pushed into hard scrabble poverty.”

She underlined that the world was hurtling towards three degree Celsius temperature rise by the end of century and it was community and people that were affected and the world had to start preparing for it.