Pick up the plastic, please

Garima Pura

It’s a spectacle to see me carry weekly supply of groceries home. Vegetables and fruits wrapped in newspapers envelope all surface area from elbows of either arms to palms. For the sake of convenience, I meekly cheat on my New Year resolution every now and then, and nod a guilty yes to plastic bags, when asked by the shopkeeper.

I heard about a forest clean-up (from plastic) drive being arranged in Ratnari, a quaint Himachali village, by Sanjay Austa, a part-time orchardist and eco-tourism entrepreneur. To balance my eco-karma and make up for all the plastic I used when I could have opted not to, I was on my way to Ratnari in the last week of April. Sights of thin velvet ribbon-y whites, vertically lining gigantic expanse of deodar-draped slopes. It was then, that I knew that Hindu mythology was right when it suggested that no place is more conducive for redemption than the Himalayas.

From Narkanda to Ratnari, one starts noticing stale snow snuggling in heaps on several unexpected corners of the road. It is the utter unwillingness of the deodars — whose dense protective blanket doesn’t let sunlight penetrate — to let that late March snow melt. One tends to get optimistic at the sight of snow in the last week of April. So, it mustn’t catch you by surprise that I mistook sprawling apple trees covered with white netted cloth upheld on tall sticks for low-lying snow peaks puckered against each other.  Eventually, if you’re as under-researched as me, you’d Google (if network permits) to discover that Ratnari is known for its apple orchids and April is a good time to see them flowering. 

Over the next seven days, Sanjay and his staff supplied volunteers such as yours truly and many others from across the country, with comfortable accommodation, delicious pahari grub and a generous serving of warmth.

On a typical day at the cleanliness drive, shortly after breakfast, Sanjay and his team would lay out all the paraphernalia that could come handy to navigate any topography that the forest could potentially expose us to. Kiltas (back baskets) painted a bright, eye-grabbing yellow were mounted on the backs of Sanjay’s staff, of whom Satpal and Vikram were regulars on our expeditions. We were armed with gum boots, poly-vinyl chloride gloves (iron your frown, this is reusable plastic) and masks.

All of us, hawk eyed to hunt plastic, were attempting to understand consumption patterns based on our finds. For instance, we figured that a popular twisted, spicy snack is a common choice for consumption with alcohol. However, nothing beat the amount of fresh mint chewing gum wrappers, and a new variety of fruity ones too, that dotted nearly every centimetre of the road. We found a narrow stream choked with Styrofoam plates and disposable single-use spoons with un-aerated balloon skins floating around it. It didn’t take much for us to guess that this stream had faced the aftermath of a party.

Large pockets of these slopes were dumping grounds for sanitary napkins; toffee and chocolate wrappers; plastic bottles with muddy residue, even fungal growth in them; gutka, cigarette packets, etc.

Vikram, the in-house master chef, was rather successful in accumulating shampoo sachets and bottles of most brands, especially the one that promised us a lead-free alternate to Maggie. He faced a distraction soon when he gave up plastic basket-ing for wild guchchis, the most expensive variety of mushrooms found in the Himalayas. Soon enough, we stumbled upon a slope flooded with emptied medicine strips. Satpal was quick to remark, “People use medicine to heal themselves and leave their plastic strips to disease the forest.”

A clear direction from Sanjay was to clean the waste from biodegradable materials and ensure we are collecting only plastic. While scraping off vegetation that had grown a layer over a plastic sheet, I got reminded of what a tree-loving friend, with his own mini-nursery once told me, “Plants have indomitable spirit. Cut them in one place and they’ll grow twice as large in another”. While I stood there to witness the unwavering spirit of the forest, I couldn’t help but notice the suffocating eyesore that plastic was for their nourishment. We found plastic packaging of a popular snack that dated as early as 1991, far from decomposition. It was a dim moment, to have found on earth a plastic packet surviving since 1991 with no intention of perishing, while species which have lived here since centuries are endangered. For the fact, our routinely used plastic bags take 10 to 1,000 years to decompose.

Our team of 10 had 22 bags of plastic by the end of the week-long drive. Sanjay had arranged to transport all of this waste to a municipal corporation-supported energy plant in Shimla, where the collected waste will be treated and converted into energy. It might seem like a task to carry around a cloth bag to accommodate plastic waste we consume and even harder to segregate and dispose it responsibly, but after digging centimetres of mud to find a stubborn plastic remnant from decades ago, one tends to wonder, why not and if not now, when.