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By Rabi Raj Thapa

Lately, Nepali Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli inaugurated the National Climate Conference organized by the Ministry of Forest and Environment in which he strongly emphasized on “Mountains to the Sea” slogan on environmental protection. For this, Nepal’s National Council for Environmental Protection and Climate Change Management also commenced a series of meetings to resolve Nepal’s perspective for “COP 29”. At the same time, Kathmandu Municipality fined the UML-led rally for overlooking the littered plastic bottles and empty plastic packages while “Raising (Political) Mass Awareness” among his party cadres and addressing the people of Nepal.

Like other countries of the world, we can see the plastic invasion of Nepal from city streets and parks up to the remote village. The littered plastics have changed this natural and beautiful country into an environmental mess. Therefore, it would have been a timely and prudent decision if the Prime Minister had campaigned to raise awareness to reduce plastic use and control plastic pollution first.

As a matter of fact, the amount of plastic production and its adverse impacts on the world environment has risen sharply in the past few decades. Keeping this catastrophe in mind, delegates from 175 countries came together in the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee (INC-5) held at Bussan, South Korea to reduce plastic pollution and to push and address the global crises of plastic pollution by developing a treaty agreement.

In this regard, had Nepali government bodies like the Ministry of Forest and Environment and institutions like the Council for Environmental Protection and Climate Change Management prioritize to raise awareness and educating Nepali on plastic pollution, it would have been a praiseworthy initiative than clamoring for populist slogans like “From Mountains to the Sea”.

It is obvious that Nepal is also a massively plastics-polluted country. Recently, German DW TV News (English, 26 November 2024) reported that more than 52 million tons of plastic pollution enter the world environment each year. It reported India is the most plastic-polluted country in the world with 9.3 million tons of plastic released annually followed by Nigeria with 3.5 million and Indonesia with just over 3 million followed by China and Pakistan. (DW News (English) 26 Nov, 2024)

According to a senior attorney with the environmental health program from the Center for International Environmental Law, Giulia Carlini, “the problem with plastic is huge and could double within a decade and triple by 2050 if no action is taken. Today, it is not only a question of who is producing plastic but who is really profiting from it and at what cost to human health?” Today, scientists claim to have found microplastic in major organs of human bodies like lungs, blood and brains. Plastic pollution is not only a menace to the environment; it is also creating serious health crises.

But the plastic pollution control and capping plastic production material is a great challenge.  Because, there is a strong link between plastic industries, big economic investors in plastic industries and fossil fuel industries; because 99 percent of plastic originates from fossil fuels; from oil and gas only. For this reason, the first challenge is to cap plastic production.

With plastic production, there is a problem of toxic chemicals used in plastic. There is also a huge plastic waste problem in the oceans and the land alike. For this, all nations must work and walk together to clean up that mess. Otherwise, it will simply be impossible to reduce and manage threats of plastic production without global initiative and binding commitments.

So, let the donor-driven country like Nepal focus more on domestic problems and challenges before busying itself into lofty slogans like that of “From Mountain to the Sea”. People in Nepal and around the world will take it saner and appreciate that.