ISLAMABAD: Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change today in its endeavor to make the country plastic free had managed successfully to turn the Parliament Secretariat ‘plastic bags and one time use plastic bottles free’.
The Senate body meeting held here with Senator Sitara Ayaz in chair mulled over solid waste and ambient pollution management initiatives taken by Capital Development Authority (CDA), Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad (MCI) and Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (PAK-EPA) respectively.
The ministry of Climate Change (MoCC) distributed cotton bags among the committee members and participants of the meeting to discourage and reduce the usage of plastic bags.
Additional Secretary, MoCC Babar Hayat Tarar said, “It is a souvenir for the parliamentarians and the members of the journalist fraternity among others to help shun the use of plastic bags in the public.”
He said that under the mechanism for plastic-free Islamabad every customer would be charged for a cotton bag which would assist in bringing the cotton bags vogue.
“Kenya has banned single-use plastic whereas, during our visit to Kenya on the 4th United Nations Environment Assembly session, we have requested the Kenyan government to provide the framework for assistance in implementing it in our country,” he informed.
He said, “We were dependent on the hospitals’ owners of the federal capital to ascertain the quantity of hospital waste produced and disposed of into incinerators. We intend to audit the hospital waste report as a third party and are also working to develop software for real-time data.”
Chairperson Committee Senator Sitara Ayaz intervened that during her visit to India, Bangladesh, and other regional countries, it was astounding to see that they were leading Pakistan in terms of environmental conservation, adding “we need to scale up our efforts to catch with their pace.”
Director General (PAK-EPA) Farzana Altaf Shah informed that the agency had formulated legislation on multipurpose plastic bags and one-time use plastic bottles to be banned till December 2019.
“We have created a float for awareness of the general public on plastic hazards and single-time use plastic bottles. The federal board of directorate has also been taken on board to educate student fraternity on the matter and discard multiple-use plastic bags,” she added.
The DG PAK-EPA further said that we were also working in collaboration with Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry to establish Clean Industrial Zone as a model for the rest of the country where Clean Industrial programme was simultaneously launched with Plant for Islamabad Day to turn the industrial zone into a green area.
We were also working on curbing vehicular emissions induced air pollution as it was one of the major causes of Smog, she added.
She said that IJP road traffic at specific times was also contributing to bad air quality with a dangerous level of pollutants due to poor quality fuel.
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