In recent years, many new \u201cgreen solutions\u201d have been proposed to tackle plastic waste, but several of them offer only superficial fixes doing little to reduce pollution. They, in turn, land up stripping waste workers of their livelihood while also generating more emissions than they appear to curb.<\/p>\n
These energy and capital intensive technologies are concentrating the responsibility of waste management in the hands of a few conglomerates. Additionally, policy solutions like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for plastic packaging, meant to encourage companies to design better packaging, are being undermined by some companies that use loopholes in the system to buy fraudulent credits and claim compliance without any real action.<\/p>\n
\u201cFalse solutions are propagated by the same industry that created the problem,\u201d says Arpita Bhagat, plastic policy officer with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), Asia Pacific, referring to large corporates in the fossil fuel and power sector. \u201cDuring climate COP, the industry\u2019s alternative for energy was large solar plants instead of coal. It was just a change in technology even as the climate community kept talking about decentralised energy and energy poverty. Large solar and wind energy plants have deep rooted issues of equity of who benefits, who loses and how land grab happens. Plastics has the same problem now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The global negotiations for a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution<\/a> have evolved to have two camps \u2014 one that considers plastics a waste management problem while another that says plastic production is the root cause of the pollution. \u201cPlastic production was the biggest fault line in the last negotiations in Geneva in August 2025,\u201d says Neil Tangri, Science and Policy Director at GAIA Global. \u201cCountries with interest in petrochemicals do not want it touched. So to distract everybody, they keep shifting the blame on downstream waste management. And as long as people keep looking for clean-up solutions, nobody will disturb their business.\u201d<\/p>\n Plastics are a combination of petrochemical polymers (large molecules composed of smaller units called monomers) and a variety of additives to get desired attributes like elasticity and colour. \u201cOn recycling, the polymer chains break down into shorter chains and the quality deteriorates. Even PET, considered the best recyclable plastic, can only be recycled three to four times before it is rendered useless,\u201d explains Thomas Maes, consultant Senior Scientist with GRID Arendal, a Norway based environmental NGO. \u201cSo it is essentially down cycling, which means it is slowing the journey of plastic to the landfill. And it is no more food grade because we are not even aware of the kind of chemicals in the original product.\u201d<\/p>\n A 2024 report<\/a> by the Centre for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling, says most plastics except PET and HDPE have no end markets, so they are either incinerated or sent to landfills. Also, to maintain purity of the recycled plastic, a clean waste stream of a specific kind of plastic is required which is difficult to maintain in plastics discarded after use especially in countries where waste segregation is still a challenge, it says.<\/p>\n The report explains that the plastic recycling process requires more time, labour and equipment to achieve a lower quality and less efficient output (recycled resin) than freshly manufacturing plastic raw material (virgin resin) from fossil fuels. \u201cThe petrochemical companies\u2019 increased production of virgin resins further ensures that recycled resins cannot compete and that plastic recycling is not economically viable,\u201d says the report.<\/p>\n \u201cThe industry has known this since the 1960s but they have still propagated the recycling myth to fool consumers into buying more,\u201d says Tangri.<\/p>\n The recycling myth<\/p>\n As India grapples with mounting plastic waste, a growing number of disposal technologies are being promoted as efficient, green answers to the crisis. Yet many of these approaches, while presented as solutions, offer only limited environmental gains and often create new problems of their own such as higher emissions, toxic by-products and undermining efforts to reduce waste at its source.<\/p>\n The most common plastic waste disposal solution adopted in India is incineration, where the output is used as an alternative fuel in cement plants or to generate power. A thermal \u201cwaste to energy\u201d (WtE) plant incinerates non-recyclable combustible waste to produce heat which further generates steam to produce electricity.<\/p>\n According to the Swachch Bharat Mission guidelines<\/a>, \u201cWTE projects are financially and operationally viable only with assured input of minimum 150-200 tonnes per day of non-recyclable, high-calorific value segregated dry waste.\u201d<\/p>\n However, only 10-20% waste in India is worth incineration, most of it is biodegradable.<\/p>\n \u201cIt (waste in India) has 80% water content. Moisture has to be extracted from the waste for 15-20 days before feeding it into the incinerator. We don\u2019t even know where that leachate is being dumped. Despite global experience with WtE proving the technology to be extremely toxic for surrounding communities and the environment, the Indian government continues to support it,\u201d Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran from the Centre for Financial Accountability, told Mongabay-India.<\/p>\n WtE emits<\/a> between 250-600 kg CO2 per tonne of incinerated waste, equivalent to that from coal combustion besides dioxins and furans, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and heavy metals like lead and mercury in their bottom ash that is around 27-40% of the input waste. WtEs have been reported<\/a> to dump this ash in the open.<\/p>\n The high capital cost of WtEs and the public private partnership model creates a long-term lock-in effect for civic bodies. \u201cThe municipal bodies are bound to provide the company with a stipulated amount of waste daily otherwise the plant will have to pump in diesel to reach the required calorific value. This discourages any initiatives in waste reduction at source. That\u2019s why, WtE is called a \u2018hungry beast\u2019,\u201d says Maes.<\/p>\n Co-processing plastic waste in cement plants to fuel them, is touted as a \u201ccircular economy solution<\/a>\u201d, claiming to divert waste from landfills while reducing dependence on fossil fuel in cement plants. Without adequate pollution control equipment however, co-processing has emissions too. \u201cBurning plastic is in fact worse than burning coal so it does not really address the issue of using fossil fuel. Disposing plastics like this gives a false sense of recycling to consumers,\u201d says Kulasekaran.<\/p>\n An extension of processing plastic in this way, is the chemical recycling process, where plastic waste is converted into oil, gas or its basic building block, the monomer, in a highly controlled environment. \u201cIt\u2019s pyrolysis. They put plastic waste in a sealed chamber, reduce oxygen and heat and it breaks down. The process consumes a lot of energy and emits toxins. The plastic still cannot be recycled back to the same quality as is the case in metal recycling,\u201d says Tangri.<\/p>\n There are also policy interventions such as plastic credits and EPR for plastic packaging. EPR in India makes producers, importers and brand owners (PIBOs) using plastic packaging responsible for collecting and recycling the plastic packaging waste they generate. In practice though, recyclers generate recycling certificates as per the quantity of plastic they have recycled and trade it in the market, by selling it to brands.<\/p>\n Loopholes in the system allow PIBOs to exploit it. In 2023, an inquiry by CPCB found<\/a> that three recyclers in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka sold 6,00,000 fake certificates. The recyclers did not have the recycling capacity that they had declared while applying for registration. The CPCB however, did not reveal the brands who bought those certificates.<\/p>\n To encourage circular economy, the EPR rules, introduced in 2022<\/a>, mandated brands to use up to 30-50% recycled plastic in their products by 2024. \u201cThat\u2019s hardly done. Rigid plastics were never a problem to deal with earlier also as new products can be made out of them. The actual problem is post-consumer-use flexible plastics that were difficult to recycle so nobody picked them up. Recyclers invested in replacing machinery to give them better quality recycled plastics. But unless they buy it back for use in their products, the purpose of circularity can\u2019t be served. Instead, they resort to buying certificates from end of life (EoL) waste processors like WtE and co-generation plants to show compliance,\u201d said Rajesh Pahwa who owns a recycling firm in Delhi called 21st Century Polymers.<\/p>\n The rules make a clear distinction between EoL and recycling certificates and mandates phasing out of EoL certificates over a period. However, CPCB has till now allowed PIBOs to generate EoL certificates in order to meet deadlines, informed Pahwa.<\/p>\n The price of certificates for different categories of plastics is another limiting factor. \u201cIt takes a day to collect half a kilo of multi-layered plastic. But the EPR certificate rate for that is just \u20b91 per kilo. How much will a recycler pass down to the waste-picker in this case? And the cap on penalty for PIBOs is \u20b95 so a PIBO finds it much easier to pay the penalty rather than the actual cost of recycling which comes around \u20b915,\u201d said Pahwa.<\/p>\n \u201cEPR in India cannot be looked at as a one stop solution for plastic waste because it is not really tackling the problem of plastic pollution. In geographies with mature and successful EPR systems, the funds generated from EPR go into a corpus where they are used to improve the plastic waste management and recycling system. But in India we see a lot of data opacity, collusion and poor monitoring by regulators. The system is lenient for the PIBOs whom it is supposed to regulate. The idea of EPR was that brands, when mandated to pay for collection, recycling, and processing would transition to better formats of packaging or explore reuse and refill systems. But so far, EPR in India has only led to compliance on paper (in terms of buying the required number of credits),\u201d says Siddharth G. Singh, Programme Manager at CSE, New Delhi.<\/p>\n Unless the root cause \u2014 the production of plastic \u2014 is addressed, downstream waste management does not make sense, say experts. \u201cThe onus of clean-up can\u2019t be on citizens. The government and the private sector have to take the lead in adopting alternatives to plastic packaging,\u201d says Sumana Narayanan, deputy director at GAIA Asia Pacific. Globally, 40% of the plastic produced is used for packaging.<\/p>\n Narayanan talked about the concept of zero-waste cities. \u201cIt is not an expensive technology but better resource management. There are excellent reuse and refill systems in South-East Asian countries which must be promoted instead of incineration which is the last step in the waste hierarchy. A medium-sized city in Phillipines, San Fernando, diverted 80-90%<\/a> of its waste from the landfill by following zero waste practices. Kerala has also done substantial work there,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The Green Chennai Initiative<\/a>, a people\u2019s led zero waste city project, has recommended to the city administration to ban problematic plastics. \u201cWe are asking the government to subsidise facilities to set up material recovery and composting plants for decentralised waste management like they are subsidising WtE plants,\u201d says Kulasekaran.<\/p>\n Recycling is the last leg of circularity, says Swati Sambhyal, Principal Expert, Pollution, at GRID Arendal. \u201cCircularity means reducing the use of virgin plastic, avoiding single use plastics and avoiding harmful chemicals and additives during manufacturing. It requires the brands to design their products for circularity \u2013 reuse, repair and refill \u2014 which then needs to be supported by infrastructure for resource management and then local policies to create an ecosystem for awareness and behaviour change while recognising the role of waste workers in the system,\u201d says Sambhyal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe use and throw culture of plastics is surviving on the back of cheap labour in the recycling industry. Otherwise, recycling is an expensive process given the kind of susbsidies on virgin plastic. Systems like reuse, washing glass bottles for milk delivery, for instance, would only create more livelihood. If the alternative systems are fixed over the existing system, the reverse logistics does not change completely and just transition becomes easier,\u201d says Lubna Anantakrishnan, CEO of SWaCH, the Pune based cooperative of self-employed waste collectors.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is clear that only inclusive, community-led zero waste strategies that deliver climate and social benefits will work. So, it\u2019s time that policymakers invest in solutions that empower communities \u2014 not polluting disposal systems,\u201d says Tangri.<\/p>\n However, financial flows show an opposing trend. A 2024 report by the Circularity Initiative<\/a> revealed that out of $190 billion private investment in tackling plastic pollution, 82% was channelled to downstream solutions like recovery and recycling. \u201cSolutions such as refill and reuse, received only $8 billion (4%),\u201d notes the study that tracked investments in 100 countries.<\/p>\n Another 2023 study<\/a> by Climate Policy Initiative that tracked funding for methane abatement found that 94% of the finance meant for reducing methane from solid waste went to waste incineration. Countries like Indonesia, Nepal and Costa Rica have also listed WtE in their Nationally Determined Contributions<\/a>, a country\u2019s individual targets for greenhouse gas mitigation.<\/p>\n In February 2025, India\u2019s CPCB listed WtE under the Blue category<\/a> which is for essential environment services, thus giving them extended \u201cconsent to operate\u201d period despite several violations<\/a> of emission norms. In October, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change moved a draft notification<\/a> relaxing the need for a prior environment clearance for such plants. This is besides subsidy<\/a> from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.<\/p>\n \u201cPolluting technologies are increasingly shutting down in the global North but multilateral banks are still funding such plants in the Global South, more so in areas where it is difficult to monitor compliance, which shows their double standards,\u201d says Kulasekaran.<\/p>\n \u201cPrivate companies are monopolising the entire waste value chain by picking up contracts of transportation and charging a high processing fee. In Chennai, it is Rs 2000\/ton. This has pushed the informal waste workers out of the system,\u201d says Kulasekaran.<\/p>\n The waste pickers will not suffer if plastic is replaced, says Jai Prakash Chaudhary, an informal waste worker who now runs a PET bottle bailing plant in Delhi\u2019s Jakhira. \u201cTwenty years ago, there was only metal, in future, it could be cardboard. As long as there is segregation, the ragpicker will survive. But these large companies are killing our livelihood by taking away the entire waste. People feel all their garbage is being recycled while actually they are just burning it and harming our health,\u201d says Chaudhary.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Banner image: A ragpicker collects plastic to recycle from a garbage dump in Siliguri, West Bengal. (AP Photo\/Tamal Roy)<\/p>\n ![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/AP18156273631906-e1776075312665-768x510.jpg\")
A worker loads bundles of PET plastic bottles onto a truck for recycling at an industrial area on the outskirts of Jammu. Experts say even PET, considered the best recyclable plastic, can only be recycled a few times. (AP Photo\/Channi Anand)
\nPlastic recycling is no silver bullet for waste crisis<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/AP19202300939043-768x512.jpg\")
A worker sorts used plastic at a recycling unit in Mumbai. (AP Photo\/Rafiq Maqbool)<\/p>\n![\"Plastic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2881962776_f525e676b9_k-768x512.jpg\")
Plastic cans assembled at a recycling unit in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Image by Cory Doctorow via Flickr<\/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>).
\nWhat works<\/p>\n![\"Experts](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/pixnio-6000x4000-1-768x512.jpg\")
Experts say the use and throw culture of plastics cannot sustain in the long term since recycling is an expensive process. Reusing materials and switching to glass bottles can create more livelihoods. Image by Bicanski via Public Domain.
\nWho wins and loses<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776705320_221_e598edd28ae58437c69611594573348c244f4fdc359219fe38d2a5aa1bbe90de.png\")
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