Incentivisation of consumers guarantee to end plastic pollution: Sherry Rehman

ISLAMABAD, Oct 13 (NNI): 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. NNI