World Environment Day: Concrete plan to combat 'plastic menace' is need of the hour

India is the global host for this year's World Environment Day and several events are slated to be held across the country to celebrate this day.

The theme of this year's World Environment Day is 'Beat Plastic Pollution'. In the last few decades plastic pollution has truly emerged as a massive problem. Plastic takes hundereds of years to decompose and a UN statistic says that the world produced more plastic in the last decade than in the previous century. Plastics and their byproducts are littering our cities, oceans, and waterways, and contributing to health problems in humans and animals.

The palstic problem has assumed such mammoth proportions that it is now being seen as one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. This year's environmental day's theme is aimed at spreading awareness so that people reduce as much plastic use as possible and create a worldwide movement to clean up the planet.

India is the global host for this year's World Environment Day and several events are slated to be held across the country to celebrate this day.

Erik Solheim, UN Environment Executive Director, said plastic is a huge environmental and health issue.

"Our aim is to make India and the world's homes plastic-free to avoid enormous pollution to our environment and to our own health. This must stop and there's no one better to inspire to this than Mahatma Gandhi and Sadhguru," he told news agency ANI today (June 5).

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, founder of the Isha Foundation, called for a 'conrete solution' to tackle the plastic pollution menace.

"This has been a concern for me and many other people including United Nations. It's just that now there is a concrete action in the direction. Plastic is a classic case of, whatever is given to us, we know how to make a problem out of it," he told ANI.

"Plastic is a necessity for us, but it shouldn't become a curse. We have to abolish the use of single-use plastic in the world. We have a responsibility towards environment and mother nature," Union Minister of State for Environment Mahesh Sharma told ANI.

Yesterday (June 4), Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan said that for India, World Environment Day 2018 is not a "symbolic" celebration, but a mission. The minister during the World Environment Day celebrations invited people to take care of their Green Social Responsibility and urged them to take up Green Good Deeds in everyday life.