Plastic Surgery of Nature

Long time ago I went to a Animal Park. Park was full of animals and birds. I was astonished to find one sign board talking about a deer's death. It was not a mere death of some rare species of deer, but a trigger which opened the eyes of the Park authorities. The incident which occured was none of a surprise. The deer died due to the intake of a plastic bag.

One visitor threw some food item along with the plastic in the deer's cage. That innocent mammal didn't have any clue of what is going into its belly. It wouldn't have imagined that the enthralling beauty of plastic could be the venom for its death.

Many such incidents provoked the writer in me to write about Plastic, ofcourse the evil side of it. Its presence is ubiquitous. Railway stations, Bus stands, offices, footpaths, temples, parks are full of multi colored plastic items. It is multifaceted too, in the form of plastic covers, plastic glasses, plastic switches and what not.

Every day when i wake up i hold my plastic tooth brush, comb my hair with plastic comb, apply oil from a plastic bottle, drink water from plastic drum, bath in a plastic bucket, put on my plastic headphones etc etc. Every second of my life has an instance of plastic in it. I wonder how we lived without this. Plastic is so handy and cheap that you can't live without using it.

There is no one on earth who doesnt know the property of plastic, that it doesnt get destroyed and that it can't be converted into other forms, which makes it more deadly for the mankind. There is a famous line from Matrix which is like "Everything which has a begining has an end Neo". But Agent Smith didnt think of plastic then. Its not hard to imagine the future of earth in next few years if the plastic consumption goes like this for next couple of decades. Heaps of Plastic surrounding the whole earth.
If we dont proactively take actions against this then we there would be hardly any place to live in this planet. In some of its forms plastic carries many chemicals which when mixed with food items causes slow but long lasting side effects.

Though there are many solutions to remove plastic and replace it with bio plastic which is degradable and recyclable. But the problem with new schemes are that they are costly and takes some amount of time to dethrone the existing entities. Meanwhile we can just take some steps to avoid using plastics. Whenever possible use cloth bags, avoid taking too many covers if you can manage with one, reuse the existing plastic as far as possible, avoid carrying food items directly in plastic bags.