‘Plastic ban isn’t working, govt needs to rethink strategy’
According to Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment, the ban has to be enforceable to begin with. We need to understand where and why plastic isn’t getting recycled and devise our plan accordingly, she tells Amit Bhattacharya. The government banned single-use plastics (SUPs) last year. Has the ban been effective? What else needs to be done? ■ The government’s singleuse plastic legislation is too little, too late. Take carry bags. The ban is based on the micron, or thickness, of the bag. Now, if I were to ask, what is the micron of the bag you’re holding, you will say, ‘I don’t know’. This is why it is very difficult to enforce a ban based on microns. Bans on carry bags that have been successful across the world have been ones where there is a total ban on these items. As for other banned products, apart from earbuds, which are made by a few known companies, all others are unbranded items. Now, unbranded items are very difficult to stop at the production stage. For instance, it’s very laudable that the government has put plastic cutlery in the banned list. But its production happens in the unorganised sector. So, you can’t really enforce it at the production stage, but only during sale or use. That means, you are talking about raising awareness among millions of people about the ban. Usually, if you go to a shop and see plastic cutlery, you will assume that the government has in some way allowed it and you will pick it up. That’s why this ban is too little. The way the items have been chosen, you will never be able to enforce it. We need to rethink our plastic strategy and move out of just single-use plastics to something where we can really understand what the problem is, where plastic is not getting recycled and why it is not getting recycled. Those are the items you need to ban. Should products like multilayered plastics, whose use has grown manifold, be brought into the ambit of a more comprehensive ban? ■ In the government strategy, multilayered plastics are covered under what is called EPR — extended producer responsibility. A gutka manufacturer would be told he has to set a target of how much plastic he will collect and recycle. He is not told how many gutka sachets to recycle. He can collect any kind of plastic and give a quantity to the government. Obviously, this is not going to help us dealwith the sachet problem or the multilayered plastics at landfill sites. Let’s understand that the plastic problem in India is because of two things. One, we are not segregating the plastic at source. So, it gets dirty and contaminated and we are not able to reuse it. Two, there is a type of plastic that cannot be recycled. If we understand this, the focus of our strategy would be to make sure there’s wet and dry waste segregation. Once you separate the dry waste, you can start looking at what in it cannot be recycled. And that’s the plastic you need to ban. Obviously, one of the most important materials in that respect would be multilayered plastic. It’s very simple: anything that you want recycled has to be a single polymer. The minute you mix different types of polymers, it is difficult to recycle. The only thing you can then do is send it for co-processing or incineration. But even for incineration and making good quality RDF (refusederived fuel), you need to have the incinerable plastic separated. So, that’s really where the policy for plastic should go. You talked about the importance of segregation. How do you assess the role of civic bodies as organisations responsible for waste collection? ■ Here is some good news. Actually, a lot of progress has been made on household-level segregation. Two things have happened. One, the government policy has changed and that’s a big thing. The ministry of housing and urban affairs (Mohua) has come up with a fantastic policy for Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) 2. 0, where they have said that household-level segregation is the bottom line of waste management. They have also said that cities will be rewarded and, in their rankings, have given maximum weightage to householdlevel segregation because they know without this you can never have a circular economy and you can never recycle. So, the Mohua policy itself has been fantastic. It’s a new approach for India and it needs to be understood that we have moved ahead. Secondly, if you look at cities, there are some amazing examples. We talk a lot about Indore but there are others. There is Bhopal, there is Ambikapur. . . There are so many cities now in India doing incredibly powerful work for household-level segregation and waste recycling. So, you’re saying the government strategy of Swachh rankings is working. It’s playing a role in people trying to clean up their act. ■ Absolutely. The ranking is just a number. It has weightages under it, which is the design of the policy. In 2017, the maximum weightage was given to a city that was visibly clean, where you had a collection system in place. In 2023, the weightage is focused on how much waste a city processes. How much house hold-level segregation happens. So, the weightage has changed and that is an important nudge for cities to adopt a different waste management strategy. Would you say that one of the problems with waste management in India is the big role of the informal sector in it? ■ I’ll be very blunt. The only reason this country is not completely drowned in waste is because we have an incredibly sophisticated informal sector, which despite safety concerns, collects every piece of recyclable plastic and is able to sort, segregate and recycle it. We should be immensely grateful to these true waste warriors of India. And, the more successful cities are those that have integrated the informal sector into the waste management systems. And, they have done so very intelligently. There are two models. In one — Pune is an example — the waste management operations have been outsourced to the informal sector, which runs via cooperatives. The other model is where the city has worked out an arrangement in which the dry waste goes to the informal sector for further recycling. Without incorporating the informal sector into our waste management systems, India will never succeed in going forward. We need to make sure these livelihoods are secured and the workers get better employment conditions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they get formal employment but that they get more money and better safety conditions. All this is possible. In Odisha, they have given transgenders the contract for the entire waste management of Bhubaneswar. In Delhi, we thought we could just privatise waste collection and the system would improve. It hasn’t happened. The best examples are coming from cities that are learning wealth from waste is best made using the labour of the poor.