According to a report on Plastic Waste Management released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs the global average plastic per capita consumption is 28 kg and India has a per capita plastic consumption of 11 kg. The Citizen Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report of 2019-20 states that 3.4 million metric tonnes of plastic waste are generated in India annually. Recently Niti Ayog and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) India have launched a handbook to promote sustainable management of plastic waste in the country. It is suggested that urban local bodies across the States should adopt the Material Recovery Facility (MRF) model and implement it as a public-private partnership model for sustainable management of urban plastic waste. The urban local bodies are mandated under the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 and the Plastic Waste Management Rule 2016 to manage municipal solid waste and plastic waste at the city level. The Environment Ministry has also recently come out with a draft notification for regulation of extended producer responsibility under Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016. Draft notification published recently specifies the quantity of waste that will have to be managed by the producers, importers and brand owners who generate plastic packaging waste in India.
We have to look into this problem in a more holistic sense because the plastic waste that we are generating is increasing in quantity over the years which is quite substantial. In fact it is about 6-7 per cent of the solid waste on average and per capita, it may vary from city to city. Goa was producing about 60 grams per person per day and this is almost double what Delhi is producing. But the question is that this data collection also has to be looked at very carefully, how large the sample is? The variation exists between colonies and the economic status of various colonies. This kind of data is useful but it is not one on which entirely one can rely. We are very much data deficient in many respects secondly, we do not know how many recyclers are there? What are their capacities? And how they operate? And whether they operate daily or weekly? There is also a problem, that there are various kinds of plastics which are mixed up and that kind of segregation poses a very serious problem and the third thing is that the producer of the plastic at the consumer level is very poorly advertised and they are not included in the loop.
Question is that how do we handle the plastic waste that ultimately gets generated let’s say it is segregated, and what do we do next, in addition to that there is a huge problem of microplastic, these are something on which we have to think very carefully. Recycling agencies say that they recycle 60 per cent of plastic which is put into the market and comes out as waste, problem happens with the 40 per cent which is not collected and does not recycle. That is something that is low-value plastic, so how to incentivise it? Since the source of generation are cities mostly, use is also increasing in rural areas because packaged products are going wide across the country. How to set up a collection? How to ensure that they are no longer littered or even if they are littered, they are collected by some agency but it’s required to be collected, sorted and recycled at least to the same polymer from which the products are coming.
MRF as promoted by UNDP with the public-private partnership is a good way, the first right step in that direction. MRF is a holistic material sorting centre that is not only looking at plastics but also at the paper, glass and metal. Once the waste is well segregated and all the recyclable material come to the recovery facility they’re further graded into various values because every paper will not have the same values, similarly, every plastic will not have the same value. So how well we sort these out will essentially determine how good the value will be of the recycled product and finally whatever can’t be recycled or processed, there’s a technology option. It can go to cement plants which is an alternate fuel that provides a very exciting possibility. Currently cement plants are run on coal and they have been asked to look at alternate fuel. It’s reported by CII that all these cement plants can have at least 25 percent thermal substitution in terms of coal which can be replaced by these alternate fuels. So, there are issues and there are solutions that look exciting at this point and they will have to be explored further.
This is just the tip of the iceberg we need to go a long way and we need to start at the right place but we need to start parallelly in other places also. We cannot wait for awareness to build upon the other parts of plastic recycling because it’s being generated every day as you read this article. We need to parallelly work on awareness and simultaneously work on finding out to strengthen the other end of the supply chain which is recycling and making sure more recycled plastic is being used which the government is now promoting to actively use recycled products in various parts of different industries and products that are consumed so that will create a demand which will also emphasize that the quality of recycling and the quality of waste management in the country will overall improvement over years and we will all make our small contribution into that grand mission as a country.
It’s a very challenging issue but a good positive beginning has been made by trying to identify the challenges and various aspects of ensuring sustainable management of plastic waste. The most important amongst them is of course making the user more aware of how to use plastics, how to dispose of plastics and how to manage waste.
(The author is an advocate by profession)
