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Since the 1950s, the world has produced 9.2 billion tons of plastic \u2014 most of which has ended up as waste. Saabira Chaudhuri\u2019s new book \u2018Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic\u2019 traces how corporations sold us disposability as modernity. In this interview with Joeanna Fernandes, she unpacks why \u2018solutions\u2019 pushed by companies have failed, how sachets became a menace, and what it will take to break free from our throwaway culture<\/p>\n
Throwaway culture has become the defining feature of our consumer experience. What led to this?<\/p>\n
Starting in the 1950s, the plastics industry pivoted from selling mainly durables to focusing on single-use products. Disposability was highly profitable and consumer goods companies embraced it as a way to offload the costs of waste onto taxpayers, expand supply chains and create or expand markets for products like diapers, coffee, soft drinks and ultra-processed food. In India, where women washed their hair with reetha, amla, or bar soap, companies unleashed billions of single-use shampoo sachets. It\u2019s key to recognise that our embrace of disposability wasn\u2019t inevitable. It was engineered. Companies poured millions into persuading people to abandon reusables \u2014 or no packaging at all.<\/p>\n
Sachets helped firms break into rural markets. Can you walk us through the crisis it has created?<\/p>\n
Sachets didn\u2019t just open rural markets, they also hooked urban consumers. Many people were unwilling to spend Rs 50 on a bottle of shampoo but happily paid two rupees to try a sachet. In fact, India turned the usual pricing model on its head: per wash, sachets are often cheaper than bottles. What began as a way to reach the poorest was soon embraced across income groups, creating a dependency that spread to products from pickles to mosquito repellent. India now consumes over 40 billion shampoo sachets every year \u2014 none of which are recycled as they are too small and low value for waste pickers to collect. Without intervention, sachet waste will keep mounting, adding to the microplastics now showing up in everything from human blood to unborn babies.<\/p>\n
INC 5.2 which concluded recently failed to produce the global plastics treaty it set out to. What do you make of the impasse?<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t expect INC 5.2 to deliver a treaty. With major plastic-producing countries like India and the US resisting caps on production or bans on problematic products, any global agreement would likely have been watered down and toothless. But the absence of a global consensus doesn\u2019t mean progress is impossible. Consumer goods companies are highly sensitive to public perception, which gives grassroots movements real leverage. Local bans can ripple upward into national policy, and regulations in regions like Europe can reshape global supply chains because it\u2019s cheaper for companies to standardise than to comply with a patchwork of rules. In other words, meaningful change doesn\u2019t always start at the global level \u2014 it often starts small, then scales.<\/p>\n
Recycling has been sold as a silver bullet despite decades of failures. What questionable \u2018solutions\u2019 is Big Plastic pushing today?<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most discussed \u2018solution\u2019 today is chemical \u2014 or as the industry calls it, \u2018advanced\u2019 \u2014 recycling. It sounds great on paper: use heat or chemicals to break plastic back into its building blocks, then turn it into pristine new packaging. The reality is more complex. Such technologies have existed for decades but have been unable to scale in the face of high costs and troubling environmental side-effects. Plastic alternatives like single-use paper also have a significant footprint \u2014 paper is water-intensive, can cause deforestation and often relies on plastic liners and \u2018forever chemicals\u2019 to resist grease and moisture. History reminds us how flimsy these claims can be \u2014 my book chronicles how when McDonald\u2019s switched from paper to polystyrene in the 1970s, its move was hailed as eco-friendly!Then there\u2019s the rush to tout \u2018biodegradable\u2019 and \u2018compostable\u2019 plastics but these are designed for industrial composting facilities, which barely exist in most countries. In landfills, they linger for decades leaching microplastics and chemicals into soil and water or decompose into methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In short, many so-called solutions are less about slashing waste and emissions than about protecting the status quo.<\/p>\n
India is the world\u2019s third-largest consumer of plastics. What policies and public messaging would work best to change consumer behaviour?<\/p>\n
India is an increasingly big plastics user but it also has a deep-rooted culture of thrift, reuse and repair. This gives it a head start compared to countries where single-use culture is more entrenched. Still, policy intervention is essential. The first priority should be to make companies fund waste collection systems and recycling infrastructure. Fees could be linked to the environmental impact of packaging, with harder-to-recycle or more polluting materials attracting higher charges. Dangerous chemicals and non-recyclable plastics should be banned. India is especially well-placed to pioneer reuse. Standardising takeaway packaging so containers can be reused would cut waste. More ambitious still, laws could require standardisation to vastly increase recycling efficiency. At present, pigments make plastics harder to reuse \u2014 purple shampoo bottles and blue bleach bottles are typically downcycled into grey plastic, unsuitable for new bottles. Standardisation could help break that cycle.<\/p>\n
How have companies adapted their strategies as consumers have grown more aware?<\/p>\n
Awareness may be higher, but our reliance is greater too. Online shopping has supercharged packaging waste, and in countries like India, disposables are replacing traditional reusables \u2014 metal water bottles, cloth diapers, home-cooked food carried in tiffins. Globally, single-use has become the default. The corporate playbook has remained largely the same. Companies tout recycling and \u2018lightweighting\u2019 as solutions, warn of cost-of-living hikes if disposables are restricted, and bankroll studies questioning the sustainability of reusables. They point to plastics in medicine, transport, and communications, while deflecting attention from the glut of unnecessary packaging, utensils, and other short-lived products that drive much of the crisis. The strategy is: protect disposability, shift responsibility elsewhere, and ensure single-use plastics remain deeply entwined with everyday life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the 1950s, the world has produced 9.2 billion tons of plastic \u2014 most of which has ended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,27756,24667,27757,27755,141],"class_list":{"0":"post-32860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-joeanna-fernandes","12":"tag-mcdonalds","13":"tag-pioneer","14":"tag-saabira-chaudhuris","15":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}