By the millions tourists, they come to Goa for the beaches on India's west coast and want to enjoy a clean environment, but they leave tons of plastic trash in their wake.

The government is shortly implementing a law banning plastic bags below 100 microns in thickness. We hope that this will help solve the problem. Each bag of this thickness would cost five to 10 rupees (US$.10 to $.20). So people would either re-use these bags or avoid using them. As the citizens stepped up their campaign, the Goa government offered some support by banning bags below 20 microns thickness.

Simply cleaning up plastics is of no use if no checks are put on their proliferation. Today, there is so much plastic all over and so much more is being added daily, that regardless of how many cleanups are undertaken, they will not get rid of the plastic waste.
After a cleanup drive over an 80 day period at the end of last year, rubbish plastics were collected from across the state of Goa. Temporary dumpsites were set up in three places. But now the campaigners are stumped by what to do with the tons of waste plastics.

Citizens need to be convinced about the need for segregating wastes. Presently, as there are no arrangements for collection of garbage, the shops and establishments burn their waste late in the evenings or dump it in gutters away from the building
Lack of rubbish bins means surroundings are littered with plastic waste including the plastic bags used to supply milk which are now strewn all over Goa. But installing bins can cause problems too. Where bins are installed, dirt piles up around them because there is an inadequate or non-existent garbage collection system.

Goa is currently one of India's most important tourist destinations, with over a million visitors visiting this region each year. One in every four comes from outside the country.

Plastic bottles form a big part of Goa's plastic problem, because so many thousands of tourists provide themselves with bottled drinking water. They leave large numbers of non-biodegradable plastic water bottles behind as waste.

Campaigners say their 80 day drive had a "significant impact" on the consciousness of people across Goa.
All that glitters is not gold. People once thought that by using plastics, they were moving up in the social ladder. Or they felt that paper was a primitive way of packaging. He believes the only thing that would work would be for the government to "make plastics more expensive.

After this ambitious campaign, citizens want to move into the next step. They plan to shift gears from having a campaign to having a garbage project.