Teen on war against plastic straws
NEWDELHI: A 13-year-old boy from Gurugram has started a campaign against plastic straws. And in a month, he claims to have convinced restaurant and hotel owners to replace nearly 5,00,000 plastic ones with eco-friendly paper straws.
A Class 9 student of Sri Ram School (Aravalli) in Gurugram, Aditya Mukarji took on the challenge and in his first month has achieved a target 488,600 plastic straws being replaced with ecofriendly paper straws, Chintan, a Delhi-based NGO working on waste management, said. Aditya said it all started on the weekend of Republic Day this January, when he decided to approach restaurants around Delhi and Gurgaon, to get them to do away with plastic straws and adopt paper straws instead.
“Giving up straws is the easiest thing for people to give up. They can easily drink straight out of mugs or use paper straws as substitutes,” said Aditya.
He said though several establishments supported his initiative and immediately came on-board, there were a few who needed more persuasion.
“Many do not know the damage plastic straws do to the environment. Most of them were taken aback when a Class 9 student explained to them the impact,” he said.
Chitra Mukherjee, head of programmes and operations at Chintan, said that Aditya went out and spoke to hotels, restaurants and clubs to sign up to a pledge to help him reach his goal to stop the use of 1 million plastic straws by the end of 2018.
Some of the establishments, the DLF Phase 5 resident has commitments from include the Metropolitan Hotel, New Delhi, Delhi Golf Club, The Clarke’s Hotel, Agra, Dighent Café and Altitude Café both in Gurugram.
Rupak Gupta, joint managing director (UP Hotels), The Clarks Shiraz, said that they have started putting up tent cards on tables that their restaurant is a ‘straw free space’. “The initiative by this little boy is quite genius. Before this we never thought that plastic straws could damage the environment to such an extent. We have started using paper straws from this month and will extend this initiative to other branches as well,” said Gupta.
Aditya said that whenever an establishment comes on board, he asks them for a letter acknowledging that they have converted from plastic to paper straws. To check that the establishments have actually banned plastic straws, he even randomly drops by and checks. A huge proportion of global waste is plastic waste. Every year, over 8 million tons of plastic waste flows into our oceans. Plastic is a product that takes around 500 to 1000 years to completely degrade due to the presence of complex polymers. This means that every bit of plastic ever manufactured or ever used by us till date still exists somewhere on the planet.