more-in “We serve cake on a banana leaf,” says Muralidhar Rao of Modern Stores, the 67-year-old popular departmental store in Ooty. Not too far back, they were served on paper plates. Similarly, the disposable cups for tea and coffee are gone now and people sip their beverage out of steel tumblers or ceramics cups. And if you order ice cream, it is served in a waffle cone and you eat that too. So nothing is thrown out. Rao is upbeat about the green changes in Modern Store since November. “We used 35, 000 to 40, 000 polypropylene bags a month! That has completely stopped. We now use gada bags that people have to buy in case they are not carrying their own bags.” There was initial resistance, says Rao but, over the months, his customers have turned the corner and now bring their own bags and the tourists are more than happy to buy them at his store. “They cost very little. We sell them for ?10 or 12...depending on the size and our regular customers who buy their monthly groceries from us happily reuse them. We make no profit on those bags. If their purchases are a lot, then we pack them in recycled cardboard cartons.” In fact, says Rao, using cloth bags has saved him the considerable expense of buying the plastic bags. “Business has improved too. We were getting concerned about the loss of quality visitors to Ooty on account of the garbage that was becoming increasingly difficult to control. Now more and more commercial outlets are seeing the positive effects of being eco- friendly.” Rao swears that the town already looks a lot cleaner. Jyothi Mehta is the Managing Director of Jyothi’s Cookies that manufactures and supplies vegetarian cookies that come in a bunch of flavours and use no artificial ingredients. Her cookies are available in the Nilgiris, in Coimbatore, Bengaluru as well as Ahmedabad. Much before the movement to ban plastics caught on, Mehta says she was greatly bothered by the use of it in her packaging. “It was personal pain,” she says. She recalls how “Every six months we ordered 40,000 to 50, 000 cartons. And each one came with a plastic lamination. We stopped the lamination three years ago, which means at least those many plastic lamination sheets have been eliminated.” Instead of the non-recyclable foil, they now use recyclable pp covers. Mehta says still plenty has to change. “Unless the end-user segregates, it will still end up in the landfill. But, as a manufacturer, I wanted to make sure the packaging was recyclable. I live in the hope that end users will segregate it.”

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