Port city against plastic pollution
V izagites have a love affair with plastic and it’s not only on Valentine Day. Look around and see the ubiquitous water bottles, water sachets, milk sachets, plastic bags, tea cups, and Styrofoam plates. Plastics are in mounds everywhere, from Akkayapalem to Andhra University, from Dabagardens to Dwarakanagar, from RK beach to Railway Station, from Gajuwaka to Gopalpatnam. They lie in heaps - at the tiffin, tea and panipoori shops, stuffed into Vizag’s drains and geddas, strewn across our once pristine beaches, at RTC bus stands, alongside our roads and rail tracks, on every empty plot of land and at temples where prasadam and offerings are made accompanied by some sort of plastic. In fact our beaches today still shows the ravages of the recent Shiva Rathri when lakhs bathed themselves in our sacred bay. The trouble with plastics Plastics are a headache to get rid of. They are not soluble in water and they just do not decompose or deteriorate easily. So every time we throw a...