. The largest contributor was the Yangtze River in China, surpassing the next nine rivers combined. The federal government is well prepared to enforce complete ban on production and use of plastic bags in Islamabad. The scheme to stop the utilization of polythene bags in the federal capital will be effective August 14. Many countries have either prohibited plastic bags or have put a price on them to dissuade too much use. Delegates of plastic bag producers told the Senate committee that after the ban, about 8,000 industrial units would close down, rendering a half million workers unemployed. The government is operating to follow the Kenyan model of making biodegradable shopping bags from plants. It first announced a ban on production or sale of plastic bags, menacing violators with up to four years of imprisonment or massive fines. This deteriorated the unemployment matter.
Every time somebody in Pakistan runs out to the store for a carton of milk, a half- kilo of loose sugar or an after-school snack, it comes in a weak plastic bag that always gets thrown away. If all those bags are summed, they total about 55 billion a year. Lightly torn and too weak to use again, they end up hindering city drains and sewers, crammed in vacant lots and parks, swallowed by grazing goats and dogs looking for food, and polluting canals and streams. All single-use polyethylene bags will be banned in Islamabad region of approximately 1.5 million people. Anyone who uses sells or manufactures them will face a fine. The ban is the latest project in Prime Minister Imran Khan’s green leadership, which began last year with a campaign to plant 10 billion trees to fight cutting down. It also follows similar actions in other developing countries, such as Kenya and Tanzania, where discarded plastic has become a toxic scourge. More than 40 countries have either banned or taxed single-use plastic bags. The Kenyans says a sudden ban is easier to compel than trying to collect a tax or fee, because there is no motivation to bribe. Shoppers are not likely to be vigorously pursued, but companies that make and supply the bags have been cautioned that they will be inspected to implement the ban. A fruit seller, said that the anti-plastic campaign is an inappropriate priority and that officials should be concentrating on more significant issues such as unemployment and poverty. Shoppers and merchants in the capital region said they were conscious of the environmental issues and approved of the ban on bags, but some questioned what could substitute them in millions of small business in impoverished areas with few supermarkets. Many old-fashioned Pakistanis remember when there were no such bags at all, and women sewed fabric totes at home to carry their household purchases. Abandoned plastic ends up in low-income communities, where residents process and reprocess used items. Many grounds there are filled with arranged piles of scrap metal, plastic ware and broken glass, with scales to weigh them for resale. Poor boys played surrounded by rotten water holes and escaped rubbish muddy seepage from plastic bags carpeting a muddy riverbed in Saidpur, a village that linked to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, by a narrow road. Pakistan consumes many billions of single-use bags a year. Guesses range from 55 billion to above 112 billion, and there’s scanty waste management. Pakistani provinces have often imposed bans on single-use plastic bags made out of polyethylene, but those bans have stumbled. Residents have not been able to enter into cheap option, like degradable plastic bags, and police have not been able to aggressively implement the bans.
The coalition government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, who has been in power for the past year, desires that this time will not be same. In July, his administration announced a ban on throwaway plastic bags in Islamabad and surrounding areas, including Saidpur. There is a condition that for hospital waste, for municipal waste, big bags will be exempted when they will submit a recycling plan to this ministry.
The provincial government of in Sindh the largest city Karachi with some 13 million people first tried to ban bags in 2006. It largely collapsed. In 2009, the federal government tried to ban plastic bags that did not contain biodegradable materials. The Sindh government tried again in 2014 to ban the bags. Plastic bags are a major problem, say residents, because they block waterways. During the last ban, shopkeepers in Sindh often presented to police inspectors bags that were stamped with information saying they were biodegradable. The police did not have sufficient money to check out those claims in a lab. Residents from across Sindh say they were not even inform that a ban was in place, suggesting that the government did not aggressively advertize the on bags, generate consciousness of the harms of plastic or even encourage police to punish violators.
This new ban will be more possibly to succeed because it has the wholehearted backing of the Prime Minister, Khan, who has prepared himself behind environmental projects in the past. Imran Khan for instance, was part of a provincial government that planted over 700 million trees for the three years ending in 2017, earning praise from the Pakistani branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature. The new ban as a pilot project if it works in the Islamabad area, it is hoped to use the legislation and acquired experience to initiate the ban in all four of Pakistan’s provinces. Notices have been published in newspapers and on social media. The administration will distribute to government employees tens of thousands of cotton, jute and thick reusable plastic bags emblazoned in Urdu with “Get rid of plastic, go for a greener environment.”