The National Green Tribunal on Monday asked a panel comprising members of the Central Pollution Control Board and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee to look into a petition accusing industries manufacturing shoe soles and other plastic goods polluting the city’s Narela and Bawana areas, PTI reported. Delhi resident Arun Kumar filed the complaint through an email.

The green court bench headed by Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel constituted the panel and asked it to file a report within a month, PTI reported. The tribunal said the Central Pollution Control Board would be the nodal agency.

“Allegation in this application received by e-mail is that pollution is being caused by the plastic industry making shoe soles,” the green court said. “They [industries] are not maintaining the pollution and waste management norms. They are throwing their industrial waste here and there which is creating problem to residents and the environment and is a health hazard.”

The National Green Tribunal will take up the matter next on January 17, 2019.

In July, the court banned industries in Bawana and Narela from extracting groundwater. Justice Goel passed the order after the Delhi Jal Board told the green court that the industries, which sell bottled water, cannot be allowed to use groundwater due to serious depletion of water levels in these two industrial areas.