And though this mountain of carry bags will eventually be sold for recycling, Birju Mundra, who runs the country's most unique garbage treatment plant, isn't excited.

The plastic bags, which have the capacity to bring to nought any serious solid waste disposal project, are now interfering with Leaf Biotech, his pathbreaking private enterprise that converts over 300 tonnes of Thane's solid waste into organic manure every day.

Mundra picks up a pile of plastic bags with decaying matter stuck on them. ``So much of organic waste caked in plastic is unusable because we can't treat it.'' Behind him, over 6,000 tonnes of garbage is piled up, waiting for conversion into manure.

The thick bags are easily separated, he says, but thin bags which comprise over 65 per cent of the plastic waste, are the real problem.

Leaf Biotech, Mundra's plant at Thane (E), is a microcosm of the problem posed by the perennial plastic carry bags.

Every day, garbage trucks from the Thane Municipal Corporation dump over 300 tonnes of plastic-caked garbage on the cement apron at Leaf Biotech. And though the bags comprise only three per cent of the waste, the damage they do is much more.

As Mundra confesses, the waste food and vegetable matter people wrap in these bags cannot be retrieved, as it's simply unviable to scratch them off the bags.

The waste is sorted out in a huge series of conveyor belts before it emerges at the other end as fine black manure, which is shipped out in gunny bags all over the country.

But not before a painstaking process of separating the plastic bags, which includes using machine blowers and human hands.

Manjnath Patel, one of Leaf Biotech's workers sits besides the sorting machine hand, earning his day's wages picking out a never-ending series of plastic bags out of the machine's conveyor belt. The bags are wheeled out to the mountain of plastic bags in the nine-acre facility.

``Soil fertility instantly drops if plastic is mixed in it, as the roots can't penetrate through the plastic,'' Mundra says, echoing feelings of the staff at Mahim Nature Park, who've had a similar experience.

But for the thousands of tonnes of garbage stored, the plant is cleaner than most factories. There's absolutely no stench of garbage, which is sprayed with organic compounds every 24 hours to eliminate the smell.

And this enterpreneur isn't speaking only for himself when he makes a simple suggestion. ``Ban the carry bag immediately and all our problems stop,'' he says.