Direction:- Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions.
We’ve heard it all — reduce and reuse, segregate, change your consumption — but nothing forces one to think about it as much as when a daily practice such as waste collection is affected. In order to make the groceries last longer and generate less waste in case collection is disrupted, we’ve been trying harder to plan each meal better and have no leftovers, but we’re still generating more than we could. Even after a carefully planned grocery run, there are too many plastic packets to put into the dry waste bag. And as we try frantically to fast track a switch from disposables to cloth diapers for the
3-month-old infant in the house, the laundry load piles in a newly designated nappy bucket. COVID-19 has hit all of our lives in myriad and unexpected ways, ranging from loss of jobs and income, to merely battling boredom by doing WhatsApp puzzles. But it has certainly made many the middle class think about things usually taken for granted , one of which is what we can do as endusers for our consumption and waste generation. With overloaded recycling centres and lack of trucks, dry waste too is to be stored until collected, and tips circulate on how to manage this — cutting plastic packets with food on three sides and washing and drying them, putting smaller paper pieces into a bigger bag and securing them to reduce volume, scraping coconut shells clean. When we actually sat with the dry waste and carried out the process of cutting and washing, we were quite amazed at how a two weeks’ worth milk packets managed to shrink to the size of a cell phone. And when we replaced the wet waste dustbin with a much smaller container, it helped us to think twice each time we wanted to throw something in. People are also being urged to switch to green options for sanitary waste like reusable cloth pads or menstrual cups, as there is no clarity on when waste collection could get further disrupted. There is of course no reason to not uphold these practices year around — many of us fail to do them simply because we have other options. We must have tried several times to make the transition to sustainable sanitary products, but may have only managed it partially. Many of the storage bottles in the middle-class kitchen are old pickle and jam bottles, but sometimes they resort to buying containers. And there is the inevitable Swiggy order on lazy days, bringing with too many  ontainers,
covers, cutlery and napkins. The lockdown seems to have brought back some of the sustainable practices, if only to avoid unnecessary shopping trips. And in the process make us realise that some changes are more possible than we expected. Now, we don’t quite have too much choice. But once this all passes we will. And hopefully, we will still carry over some sustainability habits from these turbulent times.