We have so far tried various ways to dispose of plastic wastes recycling, incinerating, dumping at landfill sites, and reusing those in some alternative ways. However, none of these proved to be efficient in the context of Bangladesh yet for different reasons.

According to the Department of Environment, the country produces around 381 tonnes of plastic waste every day, out of which around 143 tonnes can be recycled. This basically means that only 38 percent of the plastic is recyclable.

One reason why recycling proved to be inefficient is that the wastes are not dumped in an organised way. Different types of plastic products are often dumped together at the same place, thus accumulating there in tonnes and making it difficult to sort between the different types to ease the recycling process. This often raises the cost of operation too, thereby making very few interested in this business.

Dumping the wastes at landfill sites is not a good option either, as the wastes would not decompose, at least in a thousand years or so, and instead stay there making the land unusable for any productive purpose while the wastes sometimes pass on to the nearby water channels during rains and flooding.

Meanwhile, incineration is a faster and easier way to dispose of the wastes, but probably equally damaging to the environment in the same way as dumping them around, as the fumes from the burning plastic include many toxic gases, including some of the most potent greenhouse gases, which pollute the air to a significant extent.

However, we can contain the fumes and turn those into black soot which can be processed to produce ink. The ash from incineration of the wastes can be used to make bricks, just like what Ethiopia is doing. 

It is time we learn from what other countries are doing to fight against this worst ever man-made disaster to environment.

If we look at Sweden and Germany, the two countries which are recycling wastes, especially plastic wastes most efficiently, we would find that they are using their wastes for incineration, but in a process which will generate energy. The process, namely waste-to-energy, is quite a profitable one and is capable of producing energy in the form of electricity in quite the same way as a thermal power plant works, only using plastics instead of fossil fuel in this case.

source: daily star