Three Months On, India's Single-Use Plastic Ban A Dud By Tanvi Deshpande| 2 Oct, 2022
Banned plastic including straws, cutlery found in circulation in Mumbai and Delhi. Experts call the ban weak and ask that big players, that produce more plastic, and more plastic items be brought under the ban's ambit
Of the total plastic generated, the share of the now-banned single-use plastic--at, as we said, 2-3%--is minuscule. Thus, even if the ban had worked well, the impact on plastic waste generation would be negligible.
In 2020-21, India generated nearly 3.5 million tonnes of plastic, as per details provided by 35 states and Union territories. Maharashtra forms 13% of this, followed by Tamil Nadu (12%) and Punjab (12%). Meanwhile, India's recycling capacity, at 1.56 million tonnes per annum, is only half of the total plastic generated. Brands are expected to recycle around 800,000 tonnes per annum as part of their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).
India Wants Manufacturers To Manage Plastic Waste. Here’s How Proposed Rules Fall Short By Bhasker Tripathi| 5 Oct, 2020 https://www.indiaspend.com/india-wants-manufacturers-to-manage-plastic-waste-heres-how-proposed-rules-fall-short/ The draft rules offer three options to producers: pay a fee into a central corpus that would be spent towards managing the waste; buy credits from a system that would be established to offset the plastic waste they generate; or participate in and pay for establishing producer responsibility organisations (PROs) to collect and manage post-consumer plastic waste...
Industry experts who have studied the draft say the rules do not hold producers responsible, rather offer them ways to evade responsibility. By failing to put curbs on overproduction, the draft fails to emphasise waste minimisation and also provides no clarity on how these models will work.
One of the biggest reasons for India's plastic crisis is that the country's plastic industry uses different tactics to distract, delay, dilute and derail progressive legislations on plastic control that are unfavourable to them, according to an addendum to the September 2020 global report, Talking Trash: The Corporate Playbook of False Solutions to the Plastic Crisis. https://talking-trash.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/TalkingTrash_FullReport.pdf
The India-segment of this report was researched and written by Shah, quoted earlier.