When I was a child, I suffered from a disease caused by Rhodobacterales. These bacteria are present in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which is used to make children’s toys. I loved to play with toys when I was eight years old, and I had a bad habit of putting those toys in my mouth which caused me this illness.

Comparatively, I also suffered from a traumatic event in my life. I lost my mom due to plastic pollution. I was born and raised in a rural area in India and I was surrounded by a lot of plastic waste. There was a lot of chemical waste being released into the river from the factories which contained many plastic items. The village where I used to live only had one river which we used as a source of water for bathing, drinking and for other purposes. Due to this, my mom suffered from the disease called Arsenicosis and never got cured. This disease slowly caused her skin cancer. There are many other people like my mom who are suffering from a disease caused by the plastic waste.

Plastic waste literally destroyed a part of my life. It can do the same to yours. We must act to help eliminate it.

Plastic items are the backbone of our routine lives because they reduce our work, as we don’t have to clean them. Whether we go to a coffee shop or to a shopping center, we are surrounded by plastic items like bags, straws, and bottles but nobody realizes that they were made for a single use, resulting in the increase of plastic waste. They can be helpful to us in many ways, but we don’t know the correct way of dumping them which causes plastic pollution.

Lack of awareness among people is the root cause of plastic pollution because most of the time we are aware of the fact that improper treating of plastic waste can cause this pollution, but we don’t take any appropriate measures to eliminate it. Moreover, people end up throwing those used plastic items into oceans, rivers, and seas which puts the aquatic life in danger. In addition, practicing these routines for a long time can cause many harmful diseases to humans like cancer, cholera, and arsenicosis because plastic items consist of many toxic chemical components.

The use of plastic items is widely popular around the world, but there are many ways to get rid of it. The first way is to buy groceries in bulk and use reusable grocery bags.

Second, we can start reusing other plastic items, so the factories will stop making new plastic items. For example, we could buy used or refurbished electronic gadgets like laptops, smartphones, TV etc. By implementing this for a longer time, we could get rid of plastic waste.

Lastly, by creating awareness about different plastic recycling codes in schools and colleges could help us to organize our own plastic waste. Likewise, we could make a course in this education mandatory for students to fulfill their general education requirements and give them some credit.

These are some techniques we could apply to eliminate plastic waste from the world to make it green and clean. Small steps can make a big difference.