World Environment Day: 68% of India's plastic waste unaccounted for

Climate change is for real and incremental efforts won’t work. It is time for some transformation action, said Down To Earth editor Sunita Narain as she released the 7th edition of the “State of India’s Environment 2022: In Figures”, as a precursor to June 5 – World Environment Day.

The World Environment Day is celebrated on June 5 every year. The day is marked to call for action by governments, private organisations, civil society as well as individuals to protect the environment.

“Data is about measurement and the better we measure, the better we will get at management — this is what we know and this is why we put together this dataset each year,” said Narain while inaugurating the book online from Stockholm where she has gone to attend the Stockholm climate change conference.

Data helps us make sense of the changes we see in our world; it helps us understand what needs to be done, she added.

“Most of the data that the report carries is based on official government statistics that are available in the public domain. We simply analyse it and present it with a researcher’s rigour and a journalist’s insight,” said Richard Mahapatra, managing editor of Down To Earth.

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On solid waste management, the report says that in 2019-20, India generated 3.5 million tonne of plastic waste. Only 12 per cent of this was recycled, and 20 per cent was burnt, according to the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). The remaining 68 per cent remains unaccounted for, which means it is in the environment (land and water) or in dumpsites. Our hazardous waste generation went up by 5 per cent between 2019-20 and 2020-21, while our e-waste generation increased by 32 per cent between 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Emphasising the need to cut down air pollution, the report says reducing air pollution to meet the World Health Organization’s standards would add 2.2 years to global life expectancy. In India, the life expectancy will go up by 5.9 years if the country meets the WHO levels of PM2.5.

And, we aren’t eating healthy food anymore. More than 1.7 million Indians die due to diseases attributable to unhealthy diet. The diet of an Indian, on an average, lacks in fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains, the report says.