Trivandrum Hotels To Begin 2019 With A Resolution Of Encouraging People To Ditch Plastic Water Bottles

New Delhi: From January 2019, every hotel owner in, the capital city of Kerala, will be providing drinking water, free of cost, to the travellers Trivandrum and residents of the city so that people can refill their water bottles instead of purchasing plastic water bottles. B. Vijaykumar, Secretary of Kerala Hotels and Restaurants Association (KHRA) for Trivandrum told NDTV, “Water cans will be placed outside every hotel, and people will be welcomed to fill their water bottles. By not purchasing bottled water, people will be saving both, their money as well as the environment.”

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The district administration of Trivandrum proposed the idea to KHRA during a meeting held at the collectorate a few days ago, to cut down the purchase of bottled water and its subsequent dumping in public spaces, informed Mr. Vijaykumar. KHRA agreed with the idea and stated that is will be implemented first Trivandrum in January 2019 and then it will be replicated in other Kerala cities as well. According to Mr. Vijaykumar,

The hotels will be providing hot, cold and normal water and the water provided will be filtered. The hotels will also be raising awareness of the menace of plastic waste and will be asking people to bring vessels/ bottles made of metal to fill water instead of buying a plastic water bottle.

Apart from encouraging people to dump plastic bottles, the hotel owners will also try to look for plastic alternatives to curb single-use plastic items like straws, spoons, and plates. The hotels usually hand out these single-use plastic items to people with desserts and juices and also use the plastic bags for packaging and delivery of food.

Mr. Vijaykumar asserted that this initiative will help in tackling the growing plastic menace in the district as more than 5000 hotels in the district will be part of this initiative. As per UN Environment, 1 million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute and experts say that plastic takes more than 500 years to decompose. “We have decided to encourage the hotel owners registered with KHRA to do business in an eco-friendly way”, Mr. Vijaykumar said.

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NDTV – Dettol Banega Swachh India campaign lends support to the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Helmed by Campaign Ambassador Amitabh Bachchan, the campaign aims to spread awareness about hygiene and sanitation, the importance of building toilets and making India open defecation free (ODF) by October 2019, a target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014. Over the years, the campaign has widened its scope to cover issues like air pollution, waste management, plastic ban, manual scavenging and menstrual hygiene. The campaign has also focused extensively on marine pollution, clean Ganga Project and rejuvenation of Yamuna, two of India’s major river bodies.