Twelve Kolkatans spent an hour on Saturday morning picking up trash from the city’s streets, braving the intermittent rain.
The group also interacted with owners of savoury shops and hawkers selling food, asking them to use bins to dispose of the waste.
Somini Sen Dua, who organised the plogging drive — jogging or walking and picking up trash — said they were shocked to see the volume of plastic waste strewn across streets.
“We came across scores of multi-layered plastic items during the hour-long plogging,” she said. “Many multi-layered plastic (MLP) and single-use plastic products, as well as other plastic items were discarded on roads.”
MLP is used in the packaging of fast-moving consumer goods such as potato chips and biscuits. Single-use plastic items are banned in the state but they are widely available across all markets and stores.
Being lightweight, these plastic items are easily carried away by wind or water from where they are thrown on the road.
Often they slip through gully pits and choke underground drains, leading to waterlogging after a spell of heavy rain.
The group also found that the mouth of some gully pits were choked by solid waste.
Ploggers carried bags in which they collected the waste they picked up from roads. The waste was then disposed of in a cart.
Eight students from two colleges and four members of Mrittika Earthy Talks, an NGO that works on environmental issues, took part in the plogging.
Sen Dua, one of the founders of the NGO, said they had organised plogging earlier, too. On Saturday, she found that a site they had cleaned during plogging a few months ago was full of waste again.
The team came across a number of gully pits whose mouths were blocked. “It is essential to de-clog the gully pits, especially because we are in the midst of the monsoon. The mouths were clogged with dust and other waste that accumulated over months,” she said.
The plogging started from near Puddapukur in Lansdowne. After going north along Sarat Bose Road, the group entered Chakraberia and then proceeded towards Ballygunge Circular Road.
Sen Dua said they intend to undertake plogging at regular intervals to raise awareness and identify the sites that are not cleaned for weeks and months.
An official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation said one of the reasons for the choking of gully pit openings was rampant throwing of waste.
“Sometimes people even throw soil and other household waste into gully pits by opening the coverings. We do clean gully pits, but it is very difficult to do that at very short intervals,” the official said.