Plastic Pollution and Everyday Life

                                             Plastic Pollution and Everyday Life


Look around you right now. Wherever you are reading this in Cherkala.

Your water bottle. The chair you sit on. The cover of your phone. The packet of biscuits in the kitchen. The toothbrush you used this morning.

Plastic is not just in your life. It _is_ your life.

We used to use plastic. Now we live inside it.


1. A Day in Our Plastic Life (Without Even Noticing)


Let's track a normal morning:


6:30 AM - You brush with a plastic toothbrush, squeeze paste from a plastic tube.

7:00 AM - Tea comes in a plastic cover from the shop, even though you brought steel chaaya glass, they still put a plastic spoon.

8:00 AM - You go to the market, you say "no cover" but fish comes in one, vegetables in another, rice in another. You leave with 5 covers for 5 items.

12:00 PM - You order food on Swiggy/Zomato. Food for one person comes with 3 containers, 2 spoons, 1 fork, all wrapped in another plastic cover.

8:00 PM - You take out the trash. And your trash itself is in a plastic bag.


We don't throw plastic away. We just move it from our house to a pile 2 kilometers away. In Kerala, that pile often ends up in our canals during monsoon, then in our sea, then in the fish we eat.


We thought we were throwing it "away". There is no "away".


2. It's No Longer Outside. It's Inside Us.


This is the scary part we didn't know 10 years ago.


Scientists have now found microplastics - tiny pieces smaller than a rice grain - in:


- Our drinking water

- The air in our living room

- The fish at Cherkala market

- Mother's milk

- And yes, in human blood


The plastic cover you threw last year didn't disappear. The sun broke it into 10,000 pieces. The rain washed it into the river. The river took it to the sea. The fish ate it. And we ate the fish.


It's a full circle. From our shop to our stomach.


In Kerala, we saw it during the 2018 floods. When water receded, what was left stuck on every tree, every fence? Not leaves. Plastic covers. Thousands of them.


3. Why Can't We Just Stop? Because Plastic is Genius.


We have to be honest. Plastic won because it is brilliant.


It's cheap. It's light. It keeps your pickles from leaking. It keeps your medicine safe.


The problem is not that plastic is useless. The problem is we use a material that lasts 500 years for things we use for 5 minutes.


We use a 500-year cover to carry tea that we will drink in 5 minutes. That equation doesn't make sense.


4. You Don't Need to Be Zero-Waste. Just Be Less-Waste.


You don't need to live in a bamboo hut. Small, stubborn habits work better than big, guilty promises.


Here are 5 that actually work in our everyday Kerala life:


1. The Kerala Bag System:  Keep 2 cloth bags _inside_ your bike/scooter, not in your house. The bag at home is useless. The bag on your bike is everything.


2. Refuse the Small Plastics: The real pollution is not the big bottle, it's the small things - straw, spoon, extra cover, plastic fork. Saying "spoon venda" is a revolution.


3. Your Steel Identity: One steel water bottle, one steel tiffin box, one steel chaaya glass. If you carry these three, you will cut 60% of your daily plastic without trying.


4. Shop Like Your Grandmother: Buy from shops that sell in paper or allow your own container. The big supermarket forces plastic on you. The small local shop will still put rice in your own bag if you ask.


5. Segregate, Really: One bucket for food waste (for compost/cows), one for clean plastic. If you give clean, dry plastic separately, Kudumbashree and Haritha Karma Sena can actually recycle it. Mixed, dirty plastic is what ends up burned.


Final Thought


We can't clean the ocean with one person refusing one cover.


But we can stop telling ourselves the lie that "my one cover doesn't matter." In a state of 35 million people, if everyone says that, that's 35 million covers a day.


Plastic pollution is not a government problem. It's not an ocean problem far away. It's a kitchen problem. A tea shop problem. A today problem.


The plastic you use today will outlive you, your children, and your grandchildren.



Dilshad. NK

V Semester B.A. English language and literature 

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