Mining public opinion on plastic ban in India

Abstract

Every product available in our environment has a shelf life, but plastic is the only material that is non-degradable. The complex polymer present in the plastic makes it durable and non-degradable. As a result, it is found in different forms on the earth for a long time. People have become used to plastic-made product in day-to-day life like carrying bags, disposable cutlery, food packaging and many more. Extensive quantities of plastic waste have accumulated in the nature and landfills and have posed an alarming hazard to the environment, and now, it reached a crisis point. Currently, India is ranked as the top four producers of plastic waste in the world. Though there is a law against the use of plastic in India but the usage of plastic-made products is still high as the ban is not implemented completely and effectively. In this paper, we propose a framework for analyzing the opinion of Indian population on the plastic ban with the help of sentiment analysis technique on Twitter textual data. We train and test a machine learning classifier on different combination of datasets achieving 77.94% classification accuracy. The result obtained will help to understand how effective and successful polybags ban scheme will be when entirely implemented in India.