Nature & Environment

A family of Sri Lankan elephants approaches a dump site in Eastern Sri Lanka that has been infiltrating the greenery for years. Elephants make it a habit to visit garbage dumps not only because it provides easy meals, but also because it is a place where you can always find a good amount of starchy items that these giants enjoy eating once accustomed. The extremely chaotic and erratic handling of waste in Sri Lanka has resulted serious and catastrophic environmental problems. There have been numerous verified accounts of elephant deaths brought on by their ingestion of microplastics and polythene, which the animals simply mixed with the food at disposal sites. A sharp increase in such cases over the last decade has had a significant impact on the survival of the Sri Lankan subspecies of elephants, which are classified as 'Endangered' and are already in a phase of clear and rapid population decline due to poaching for ivory, conflicts with humans over the destruction of property and crops, electrocutions through illegal fencing, and an expanding human population and its demand for land.