NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Thursday tightened norms regulating use and recycling of plastic bags in the Capital to check their indiscriminate use as they pose a serious health hazard and pollute the environment. A Division Bench of the Court comprising Justice T. S. Thakur and Justice Siddharth Mridul also extended the scope of the ban on use of plastic bags to include the city's main markets and local shopping centres. Their use is already banned in hotels, hospitals and malls. At present, only 100-room hotels, 100-bed hospitals, shopping malls, liquor shops and 50-seat restaurants and milk booths are using biodegradable bags because the Delhi Government has allowed other establishments to use non-biodegradable and recycled plastic bags. To discourage indiscriminate use of plastic bags by shopkeepers and encourage rag-pickers to pick them up for recycling, the Bench made the bags more expensive by increasing their thickness from 20 microns to 40 microns. This would discourage shopkeepers from using them for packing groceries and toiletries and encourage them to shift to environment-friendly papers bags. It would also act as an incentive for rag-pickers to collect them as they would fetch more money due to their thickness.The Bench directed the Delhi Govt. to notify the norms as soon as possible. To check operation of unlicensed recycling units in non-conforming zones, the Bench directed the Government and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee to ensure closure of all such units. There is already a complete ban on use of plastic bags for packing cooked foodstuff. The Bench also directed the Central Government to set up a committee to fix standards, if they are not in place, for degradable and biodegradable plastics. The Court also directed the Delhi Government to study the report of the Court-appointed Justice R.C. Chopra Committee comprising the Central Pollution Control Committee chairman and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee chairman to consider whether use of plastics is injurious to human beings and the environment and implement its recommendations which are possible to enforce.