Plastic bag junk causes Mumbai city to lose billions of doll

Published on October 27, 2005 By Rajiv Badlani In Business

Yesterday Mumbai city was inundated by floods. The megacity, India’s business hub was paralyzed.

The cost: Billions of dollars and a miserable day for residents who couldn’t make it to hospitals, schools and places of work. Most flights were either cancelled or diverted to Ahmedabad, and trains were cancelled or ran hours late. Mumbai has an intense monsoon. You can expect incessant downpours at least 4 times every year. The downpours aren’t new. They’ve been coming to India’s west coast for hundreds of years. But the intensity of flooding is new and getting worse every year. One of the major culprits is the increasing number of plastic bags that are choking drainage systems. India actually has laws banning the use of such plastic bags, but like most laws in India, they exist only on the books. No one knows about them, no one follows them, and no one appears to care. Ironically, India is a major exporter of reusable cloth bags. We ship reusable cloth bags www.badlani.com/bags/every day of the week to other countries as they take effective steps to reduce plastic bag usage, but we don’t have any customers in India. This weblog is being acknowledged by readers around the world as a good source of information on the problems caused by plastic bags and the solutions communities have found, but again, hardly anyone in India reads it. Help! All concerned, thinking people, please help get our people and governments more sensitive to this problem. Talk to me, we'll try and figure out ways to do this together.

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