Some feel heart-broken when they see sea beaches littered with fag ends; others get worked up to see high mountain trails soiled with oxygen bottles, food-and-beverage cans, plastic ropes and other paraphernalia for mountaineering. Pious Hindus feel dejected at seeing Bagmati or the Ganges branded as the most polluted rivers in the world. One feels aghast to think that cities, which boast of UNESCO-classified sites and monuments, such as Kathmandu and Agra, are among the most polluted and plastic-strewn in the world.

One anxious lover of nature once put a pertinent question to a scientist: why can’t we send all the garbage into the sun so that the great celestial body will turn everything into ashes? The specialist’s answer, however, was not really encouraging. Among other nuisances, plastic presence is the most prominent in garbage. Burning such colossal quantity of plastic will just deal a coup de grace to environment and by extension, to more than twelve million species of living beings inhabiting the planet.

Another stumbling block to the ‘garbage container’ en route to the sun: the need to propel it at 11.2 km/s in order to avoid the earth’s gravity. How on earth humans will carry out such stint! Hence, the corollary: all the garbage of the world is here to stay as a blot on the ultimate landscape - the Earth.

Happily, not all are indifferent to whatever is happening to environment. Ladakh, the north-western territory of India, has quite effectively banned the use of plastic bags. In Nepal, the use of plastic bags is banned along the trail leading to Annapurna Base Camp and in Mustang. As far as countries are concerned, South Africa, Ireland and Taiwan are among the very few who have banned the use of the ‘immortal’ synthetic stuff.

Those who have resorted to the laudable say-no-to-plastic initiative do deserve every bit of compliment: plastic bags can scar the face of the earth as long as 400 years, that is, five generations of people may see the same plastic bag littering their garden. Garr…not an eye-catching sight, actually! And one barely needs to be reminded that in gardens, roses and marigolds look more beautiful than plastics — hence a capital NO to plastic in our collective garden — the earth.