PESHAWAR – Walk past any drain in Peshawar this week and you’ll see it: a black tangle of plastic bags, half-submerged, going nowhere. That’s the city’s drainage system now — not broken by age, but strangled by shopping bags nobody was supposed to be selling in the first place.
The irony is hard to miss. Peshawar banned these plastic shoppers years ago. Yet in the markets along GT Road and Warsak Road, vendors hand them out with every purchase as if the law never happened—and the drains are paying the price.
Also Read: Plastic Pollution in Pakistan: An Escalating Environmental Threat
A City Built to Flood
It doesn’t take a storm anymore. A light drizzle is enough to turn Peshawar’s streets into shallow, stagnant rivers, because the water underneath has nowhere left to go. The bags that clog the drains don’t rot, don’t dissolve, don’t disappear — experts say they’ll still be there in a hundred years if nobody moves them first.
And where water sits, trouble breeds. Mosquitoes have found a paradise in Peshawar’s flooded alleyways, and with them come dengue and malaria — an entirely preventable cost of a problem the city has known about for years.
Also Read: KP Environmental Protection Agency Launches Crackdown on Industrial Pollution
The Enforcement That Never Quite Arrives
Here’s the part residents are angriest about: the laws already exist. What’s missing is anyone willing to actually enforce them. Occasional raids net a few fines from small shopkeepers, but the wholesale markets and manufacturing units churning out these bags by the thousands walk away untouched, raid after raid.
Meanwhile, the bags keep showing up where they shouldn’t—wrapped around hot food from tandoors and vegetable stalls, a habit health experts warn could be quietly linked to cancer risk over time.
Also Read: Peshawar High Court Slams Poor Handling of Canal Pollution
What Peshawar Is Asking For
Environmentalists say a ban on paper is not a solution — it never was. What the city needs, they argue, is a real alternative: affordable cloth and paper bags that shopkeepers and shoppers alike can actually reach for instead.
That’s exactly what residents are now demanding from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister — not another symbolic crackdown, but a genuine operation against the factories still manufacturing these bags, paired with cheap, biodegradable options flooding the market before the rains do.
Because right now, Peshawar isn’t waiting for a flood to strike. It’s already standing in one—created entirely out of its own shopping bags.
