I
N KOLKATA, I MET A FLOWER VENDOR
named Goutam Mukherjee who
told me he gave up selling fresh
flowers years ago. We were standing
in the center of one of Asia’s largest
and most famous wholesale flower
markets, where his booth was sur-
rounded by stalls hawking garlands of fresh marigolds and other
fragrant blossoms. Mukherjee ticked off the reasons why his
plastic flowers, which were imported from China, were better
than the real thing: They cost less, look real, and don’t wilt.
The miracle of plastics arrived in India recently enough that
there is no Hindi word for the stuff, and in some places take-out
food still comes wrapped in banana leaves. The love affair really
took off in the 1990s, as the rapid growth of the global plastics
industry coincided with the liberalizing of India’s economy. If
in the U.S. the golden age of plastics ushered in the throwaway
culture of convenience, in India, affordable plastic consumer
goods simply made life better—not only for the expanding
middle class but also for those who live near the bottom rung.
Plastic storage containers, bags, and food wrap helped keep
food fresh longer. Barefoot children could get cheap shoes, and
inexpensive synthetic fabrics allowed them more clothes. Tiny
sachets provided people with access to products they couldn’t
afford to buy in larger volumes.
Yet even with the improving quality of life, the romance
faded fast. Before the decade ended, India found itself swim-
ming in plastic packaging waste that outpaced any ability to
contain it. By the mid-1990s, newspaper accounts sounded the
alarm. Plastic bags, handed out by the thousands in depart-
ment stores in Mumbai, were “suffocating the city.” Delhi
landfills were an impending “eco disaster.”
The problem has since spread beyond cities to rural areas
and even nature reserves, where numerous species, from
leopards to foxes to birds, have been seen eating plastic. At
the Rajaji National Park outside Rishikesh, a pilgrimage city
in the Himalayan foothills made famous in the West by the
Beatles, who spent several weeks there in 1968, elephants are
eating plastics in dump sites around the edges of the park.
“There are many places just outside the forest where vil-
lagers throw trash out, and the wild animals go there to eat,”
ranger Mohammad Yusuf told me, as we toured the park’s
grassy meadows and stands of tall pines. “I have seen plastic
in elephant poop many times in the last five years.”
In nearly every nation struggling to contain plastic waste,
the problem is primarily packaging, most of which is dis-
carded immediately after use. Globally, it accounts for 36
percent of the nearly 500 million tons of plastic manufactured
annually. India’s problem has less to do with per capita con-
sumption than lack of adequate waste collection. In the United
States, a person creates an average of 286 pounds of plastic
waste a year—the highest rate in the world and more than
six times India’s rate of 44 pounds per person. But the U.S.
Affordable
plastic goods
made life
better in
India, but
the pileup of
plastic waste
outpaced the
nation’s ability
to contain it.
PLASTIC RUNS THROUGH IT 97