Madhuvanthi Rajkumar, Researcher

Imagine it’s a cosy Sunday and you are waking up late after a well-deserved sleep-in. You don’t feel like cooking and you remember that you still have plenty of leftovers from ordering in on Saturday night. Feeling relieved that you only have to heat up the food, you pull out the take-out boxes of food from your refrigerator and you are ready to toss it in your microwave, thinking to yourself, “Thank God for technology!”. But the responsible adult in you pops up asking you to check if the plastic takeout box is safe to use in the microwave oven.

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), under the United Nations Environment Programme, met in Nairobi on November 13-19 for its third round of negotiations to develop an international legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution worldwide. Under the UNEA Resolution 5/14, the INC is responsible for delivering a global plastics treaty by 2025.

We all keep hearing that the world is drowning in plastic. Some of us know that it stands true even in the literal sense where our air, land and water are severely polluted and contaminated with macro, micro and nano-plastics.

On 26 May 2023, the news was abuzz with a one of a kind weather forecast which predicted that Paris would be showered with about 50 kilograms of microplastics starting the following Monda

The acronym ‘GPT’, popularised by ChatGPT, is a widely used term nowadays in the context of an ‘ask me anything’ invitation - an AI algorithm which can clear bar exams, write your resumes, create music, do your homework, etc. But there is another GPT which you ought to know, as terrestrial beings wading your daily lives through a sea of plastic (literally and metaphorically). GPT stands for Global Plastics Treaty, a historic endeavour which aims to create an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.

 The Indian Environmental Protection Act, 1986, states that the term ‘environment’ includes water, air and land and the inter-relationship which exists among and between water, air and land, and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organisms and property. The word ‘inter-relationship’ plays a key role in our understanding of the environment.