the irresponsible dumping of polythene waste to the sea will soon lead to more plastic waste in the sea than fish said President Sri Lanka Institute of Packing (SLIP) Anuradha Jayasinghe at their Lanka star awards event last Tuesday.
He said that each year an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic waste is dumped to the Sea. “It is sad to note that 80% of this is been dumped by Asians according to a study made by German researchers. These researchers have also pointed out that only 1% of plastic waste is dumped to the sea by Europeans. Time has now come for Asians to be more responsible towards the environmental protection”, he said.
Former President SLIP Razik Zarook, PC, who was the Chief Guest said the government and people should be more responsible towards waste disposal. “When there was a major flood in India, some of the hospital waste was washed away to Sri Lanka’s Manner beach recently. This showed that the Indian hospital has not taken great care about the disposal of hospital waste in a safe manner.”
Commenting on the present local packaging industry he said that it was not performing to expectations. “This is because the Sri Lanka’s economy situation where the economic growth is around 3.5%. Due to this rural people don’t have a high buying power which limits local production and intern results in less packaging assignments.But we see positives signs of the Sri Lankan economy recovering to reach around 6% growth where the industry too would recover.”
He said what the industry must do now is to focus on exports to areas such as Africa where their economies are growing at over 6%.
Zarook also said that Sri Lanka should look at more trade pacts with other countries which in turn would open out new markets for Sri Lankan exporters. Going global is the right way forward.
He also advised to move with more new technology and identified Nano technology to be a good option. “Today Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over the world and Sri Lankan packaging industry too should adopt AI to survive,” he said.
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