Staff Reporter:
Environment experts at a workshop yesterday laid emphasis on household-level segregation of organic and non-organic waste as the country’s 50 percent of plastic waste is being directly disposed to the nature as garbage.
“More than 50 percent of the country’s total plastic waste is not being recycled, we need to recycle all plastic waste into long-term use materials for checking environment degradation,” Jahangirnagar Univer-sity Environmental sciences Professor Mohammad Jamal Uddin said.
He also suggested that the government could initiate support projects for small and medium plastic recy-cling industries to produce sustainable commercially viable plastic products.
Resource Integration Centre (RIC), a local non-government organization organized the workshop titled ‘innovative plastic goods production and marketing linkage’ under its “Sustainable enterprise project (SEP)” in the capital.
Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) Chief waste management officer Md Iftikhar Ahmad Chowdhury and regional executive officer (Region-3) Babar Ali Mir, and RIC General Manager Alauddin Khan also spoke.
Currently, Chowdhury said, the DSCC collects a total 2700-3000 tons of trash including 15 percent of plastic waste every day.
He underscored the need for carrying out awareness build-up and behavioral change campaign at the root level to encourage all segregating organic and non-organic waste at their household and work places.
Chowdhury said the plastic waste recycling volume will go up rapidly, if the Dhaka dwellers can gener-ate clean plastic waste.
The waste management chief also laid emphasis on promoting plastic recycled products so that even small vendors would be beneficial from recycling waste.
The RIC has implemented a sub project named ‘Support for creating economically, socially and envi-ronmentally friendly small and medium plastic recycling industries’ in Dhaka’s Lalbag, Islambag and Kamrangirchar areas.
According to Bangladesh Plastic Goods Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BPGMEA), the growth of plastic use in Bangladesh is 20 percent per year.
It predicted that the increase trend of plastic use in Bangladesh will be continued as currently the coun-try’s per-capita plastic use is 17 kg only comparing to 45 kg of world-average.
