For India's effort to ban disposable plastic, one state offers a playbook

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CHENNAI - Amul Vasudevan, a vegetable hawker in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, thought she was going to go out of business.

The state had forbidden retailers to use disposable plastic bags, which were critical for her livelihood because they were so cheap. She could not afford to switch to selling her wares in reusable cloth bags.

Yet Tamil Nadu's ban is far from an absolute success. Many people still defy it, finding the alternatives to plastic either too expensive or too inconvenient. The state's experience offers lessons for the rest of India, where an ambitious countrywide ban on making, importing, selling and using some single-use plastic took effect this month.

But now Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has banned some of those ubiquitous items, including disposable cups, plates, cutlery, straws and ear swabs. Single-use bags are forbidden, but thicker, reusable ones are allowed. The ban does not include soda bottles and plastic packaging for chips and other snacks.

Public pressure on politicians - to fix drain and sewage blockages caused by plastic, for example - is another key reason for the relative success in Tamil Nadu. "We have to find cheap solutions to stop the use of plastic bags," said Vasudevan, who was not fined that day."The rich understand what is at stake, but for the poor, the government has to make cloth bags cheap."At the entrance of Chennai's Koyembedu wholesale market, authorities installed two vending machines that hold 800 cloth bags, which go for 12 cents each.

 

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