The Capital’s streets are teeming with plastic waste as bins are scarce and hardly ever used, leaving the locals with two options – keep their rubbish in a bag with them and throw it out at home; or chuck it in the gutters. Hundreds of thousands of plastic bags float along the Bagmati River, clog the drains, pollute the air and are consumed by hungry animals. This in many ways is a truly, disgraceful sight especially for a foreigner who for long believed Kathmandu to be a truly wondrous place filled with fun and mystery – today that image was shattered.
xCitizens of Kathmandu have gathered for another Guinness World Record attempt but this time tackling a real issue in Nepal – plastic waste. Three years ago, the government sought to implement a ban on the use and production of plastic bags in Nepal’s Capital city, in an attempt to curb the ever-growing problem of plastic pollution. The regulation failed because it wasn’t implemented correctly and the plastic issue has continued to manifest with no end in sight – until the STEM Foundation Nepal introduced the Dead Sea Map project.
The aim was to bring 100,000 plastic bags together as the world’s largest plastic sculpture of a Dead Sea map. The map consisted of 10,000 participants with 10 plastic bags each and measured at 20 metres long by 5 metres wide. On Wednesday the 5 th of December, everyone gathered at the Tundikhel Grounds, in Kathmandu for a full-day event (9am-3pm). This project was organised and run by the STEM Foundation Nepal, whose motto is to “say no to plastic bags”.
Enough damage has been done by plastic waste – there are plastic bags in our surroundings, rivers and oceans, said Surgeon BC, Founder Chairperson of STEM Foundation Nepal. “One Dead Sea is enough for us – and I hope that today’s efforts will help keep the seas clean.”
Single-use plastic bags are a major problem across South-Asia, and in Nepal plastic accounts for approximately sixteen per cent of urban waste. Plastic pollution is a critical issue in urban areas where population and area is dense. Nepal is comprised of 191 municipalities (small towns/cities) can contributes as staggering amount of plastic waste each year. SANDEE (The South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics) has estimated in a recent policy paper that if all municipalities were to introduce complete bans on plastic bags then 1,250 million bags could be prevented from entering Nepal’s environment.
The record is currently held by Singapore, where more than 200 student volunteers from the Ci Yuan Community Centre Youth Executive Committee came together at the National Youth EnvirOlympics Challenge (April 2012), to construct an octopus sculpture from 68,000 plastic bags, according to Guinness World Records.
Confirmation of the World Record will be announced once Guinness World Record officials have reviewed the video evidence.
