[77ko]

I hope it works. The problem in Pakistan is trash in general, Pakistan needs a country wide "don't litter" campaign, sort of what happened in many developed countries.

Plastic bags just happen to be the most pervasive and visible source of trash.

There aren't many places to throw trash, the norm is to just throw trash anywhere outside your house. Even the more upscale suburbs in the big cities have essentially no trash cans, and the garbage collection areas are open dumps, so plastic bags fly all over the place.

The trash is sometimes picked up and burnt, or other times just burnt in place, and the smell is toxic as there is generally a lot of plastic.

The whole plastic bag problem has a huge cost on basic city infrastructure: In most of Karachi, every drain and sewer pipe is either choked with plastic bags, or has just been cleared and will get choked again in due time. And so every time it rains, the city floods, and there is a grand proclamation of building more drains and sewers.

In North Pakistan, around the most remote and beautiful lakes, ones where no one lives as they are too high and remote, many have plastic bags scattered all around, most I assume carried there by the winds from nearby towns/villages, as some of the ones I visited don't get enough visitors to have thrown the amount of plastic bags I saw.

Visiting places (again) which used to be pristine not that long ago really hit home how much we humans have spread our "stuff" everywhere.

Edit: The ban is a bit too harsh. Should have been rolled out slowly, to give ppl more time to adapt, like targeting larger stores (which are in the tax net and thus easy to monitor and punish) and then rolling it to other stores, and finally everyone.

[selimthegrim]

My cousin to me walking on Tariq Road while tossing a plastic bag; “Who cares, this isn’t New York or America”

Me: “Yeah, and it never will be with that attitude”