Almost 90 airports of the country are now free of single-use plastic usage with the latest entrant being Delhi’s IGI airport. Delhi airport has joined 85 airports of Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Mumbai airport in getting rid of single-use plastic.
According to AAI officials, 85 airports have achieved the status of single-use plastic free in a period of one year with 55 of these assessed by Quality Council of India.
In the case of Delhi airport, the certification has been provided by Confederation of Indian Industry – ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development.
While most single-use plastics have been banned from usage at the Delhi airport, some items including security tamper evident bags (STEBs), sealed PET bottles, pre-packaged materials from manufacturers meant for sale, compostable plastic bags etc are exempted.
The GMR group-run airport has also installed “four bin” system at key locations in terminal buildings in additions to the existing two bin system for collection and segregation of paper, plastic, glass and metal, and food wastes.
State-run AAI, which manages 125 airports in the country, had declared 35 airports as plastic-free by January 2019 and another 20 were added in September.
The first phase included Indore, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Tirupati, Trichy, Kolkata, Varanasi, Chennai, Patna, Coimbatore, Ranchi, Trivandrum, Goa, Lucknow, Vijayawada, Dehradun, Chandigarh, Vadodara, Madurai, Raipur, Vizag, Pune, Udaipur, Srinagar, Imphal, Jammu, Mangalore, Amritsar, Port Blair, Guwahati, Bagdogra, Agartala, Calicut and Jaipur airports.
Under the second phase, a total of 20 airports have been identified, namely Gaya, Rajkot, Jodhpur, Gorakhpur, Leh, Surat, Aurangabad, Rajamundhry, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Dimapur, Silchar, Belgaum, Jabalpur, Tuticorin, Bhuj, Kangra, Jamnagar, Allahabad, among others.
Single-use plastics or disposable plastics are used only once before they are thrown or recycled. Items like plastic bags, straws, coffee stirrers, soda and water bottles, six-pack rings, plastic party cups and most food packaging fall under the single-use plastic category.
“The single-use plastics constitute 33 percent of all plastic waste. AAI has been carrying out internal audits of its airports along with stakeholders. We are trying to implement this on the remaining airports as well,” an AAI official said.
In the third phase, 30 more airports were added based on an internal audit. These include Agatti, Adampur, Agra, Bhatinda, Bhavnagar, Bikaner, Diu, Gwalior, Hubli, Jaisalmer, Jalgaon, Jharsuguda, Kadapah, Kandla, Kanpur, Kishangarh, Kolhapur, Kullu, Lilabari, Ludhiana, Mysore, Pakyong, Pant Nagar, Pathankot, Porbandar, Puducherry, Salem, Shillong, Shimla and Tezpur.
In case of private-run airports, while Mumbai airport declared itself single-use plastic free in October 2019, Bengaluru airport is also working to eliminate the use of single-use plastic.
