Kashmir's Plastic Crisis

A recent World Economic Forum report has highlighted the story of nearly 10,000 women in Hanoi, Vietnam who rise each morning to do a job most people turn away from. They push heavy carts through narrow lanes, sort waste with bare hands, and pull plastic out of the city's trash stream. These“Green Warriors,” are responsible for recycling nearly 90 percent of the country's plastic. What looks like menial work is, in truth, a national service: keeping rivers, fields, and oceans alive.

Kashmir has no such army. Instead, the Valley is drowning in plastic. From Dal Lake to the slopes of Pahalgam, discarded bottles, food wrappers, and disposable plates are everywhere. Srinagar's clogged drains and the Jhelum's filthy banks stand as testimony to a system that neither enforces its own rules nor offers alternatives. By official estimates, Jammu and Kashmir produces more than 51,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year. Most of it ends up in rivers, forests, and farmlands.

The consequences are far-reaching. Flooding grows worse when drains choke. Soil loses fertility, animals die from eating plastic, and our land is scarred. Kashmir's fragile ecosystem, already affected by climate change, cannot absorb the poison of unchecked plastic. And plastic doesn't go away. It lingers for centuries.

The world, too, is failing on this front. The recent negotiations in Geneva to draft a global treaty against plastic collapsed. At the heart of the deadlock was a simple but uncomfortable question: should we limit plastic production itself, or just manage the waste it leaves behind? Oil-producing nations and the plastics industry resist production caps. The result is paralysis. Every year humanity manufactures over 500 million tonnes of new plastic, and by 2040 production is expected to rise 70 percent. If governments cannot agree, the planet will pay.

That is why Kashmir must not wait for Geneva. Viet Nam shows that change can begin from the ground up. We must support community-led recycling. Civil society, schools, and religious institutions can all push awareness campaigns that make people think before they throw. Government must strictly enforce bans on single-use plastics and build systems that make alternatives accessible.

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