Every parent's dream is to see their child happy. Even when their child gets married and has children, they will always look at their child as a toddler and not a grown-up. It is just how it is. Getting one's child married is a hard task- physically, financially and of course, emotionally. It becomes an even harder task when one's second child is learning to be an adamant environmentalist and is skeptical of most of the choices made while planning for a wedding. That's me, the adamant second child.
I thought I was Eco-friendly for more than a decade, but I've noticed in the past year and a half that I'm nowhere close to that. I just sat down on my bed one day and noticed all the ways I'm contributing to destroying the environment and I came up with a huge list. From my clothes to the instruments I use as a dentist, I am surrounded by plastic in some way or the other. While most of my flowering pots at home are made of clay, I even have some made of plastic.
So, when I learned my sister was getting married, I wanted to plan a plastic-free wedding for her. Boy, was I mistaken!
A typical South Indian Telugu wedding consists of various aspects. While most of the ingredients needed for a wedding include fruits, flowers, and metal utensils after the advent of plastic wedding gifts contain a lot of plastic. Earlier, turmeric and vermilion (kumkum) were wrapped in pieces of paper when given along with Thamboolam, a practice still followed in some temples. But to make things easier for devotees, shops have started selling turmeric and vermilion in plastic zip locks. After I realized that we had planned to host at least 200 guests, my mind couldn't crunch the math of plastic that would creep into the wedding. After some search, we managed to purchase them in small metal boxes.
Since it isn't easy to just hand the Thamboolam (an amalgamation of betel leaves, betel nuts, turmeric, vermilion, and fruit) to the guests, my mother wanted to encase them in a fancy bag. I insisted on buying cloth bags with no plastic pieces attached. But to my surprise, the cloth bags were sold to us wrapped in plastic sheets to prevent them from getting dirty.
As much as I tried to avoid plastic, I got caught in it at some point or the other during the entire process. While most of the wedding decorations were biodegradable, when it came to catering there was plastic everywhere. Plastic bottles, plastic spoons, you name it. We tried our best to switch them to metal glasses and water jugs, metal spoons, and paper cups but the thought that so much plastic is made for the tiniest of things stayed with me.
It isn't easy to live a completely plastic-free life. As long as people remain unmindful to its existence, plastic demand will not reduce and manufacturing will not stop. So I urge all of you reading this, look up from your phone today, and notice all that plastic around you. It's in your clothes, your stationery, your toiletry, your cutlery, your refined food, your new sanitization equipment including sanitizers, hand-wash bottles, masks. If this year has taught us anything, it is how we were living so far is not right. We have to change. And now! Remember, every plastic element that was ever produced still exists today. If you don't know where to start, start here.
Written by Dr. Mythreyi Gudipati
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