Circular economy for plastic

Progress in handling waste has been uninspiring

The new Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2022, are marked by the innovative concepts they moot to incentivise compliance of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) for the collection, recycling and safe disposal of discarded plastic material. These norms, significantly, seek to create a market for the sale, purchase and sharing of EPR compliance certificates on the lines of the carbon trading mechanism for mitigating climate change. Simultaneously, provisions have been made, quite appropriately, to penalise lapses in fulfilling the EPR requirements. The underlying objective seems to be to evolve a circular economy in the plastics sector by encouraging recycling, sharing, leasing, trading and safe disposal of the end-of-life plastic materials. However, the success of this initiative would rely largely on how effectively these norms are governed by the Central and State Pollution Control Boards whose past record in plastic waste management is quite uninspiring. It would also require creation of awareness among the plastic sector stakeholders and general public about the need for proper disposal of plastic waste, which, otherwise, could vitiate the environment and pose grave health hazards.

India is one of the world’s largest producers, importers and consumers of plastic material, a sizable part of which is utilised for packaging. This use is believed to have gone up substantially during the Covid-19 pandemic because of the surge in online shopping. Consequently, the share of plastics in the municipal waste is reckoned to have spurted from around 10 per cent earlier to close to 20 per cent now. What is worse, over 40 per cent of the total plastic consumption is in the form of single-use items, including the plastic carry-bags, which have limited-period utility but high littering potential. The government has been trying to banish the use of such items for a long while but without much success. The latest deadline for eliminating the single-use plastic wares is July 2022. Failure on this front would mean unabated littering of public places, choking of drainage systems, and increased emission of noxious fumes from the landfill sites where these wastes are ultimately dumped.  

The new set of regulations seeks to tackle this issue by making the fulfilment of EPR obligations financially rewarding. The surplus EPR certificates earned by any company would henceforth be allowed to be carried forward, or used for offsetting the lapses of the previous year, or even traded and shared with others. A special portal is proposed to be created by the Central Pollution Control Board to oversee these transactions. Equally significant is the provision under these rules for “environmental compensation”, a kind of penalty for failure in meeting the EPR targets by producers, importers and brand owners of plastic material. The funds gathered through this measure are proposed to be utilised for collecting, recycling and end-of-life disposal of plastic waste. That said, a notable fact also is that the use of plastics —or, for that matter, the generation of plastic waste — cannot be reduced, leave alone done away with, unless their equally handy and cost-effective alternatives are made available. This would require investment in research and development, which does not seem to be forthcoming in adequate measure at present. Unless the government can come up with suitable incentives to woo investment in this field, the objective of curbing plastic waste generation and ensuring its safe disposal would remain elusive.