The importance given to plastic waste is reflection of its place in a post-industrial world. Globally, plastic falls under the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 focusing on sustainable consumption. The Basel Convention on the trans boundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their disposal places significance to trade of plastic (UNPRI, 2019).  In India, the significance of Plastic waste in the waste management policy could be adjudged by the dedicated set of rules for it. Overall, there are more than four categories identified for rules to manage waste. These categories include construction and hazardous waste, biomedical waste, solid waste, batteries waste, and plastic waste. The integration of plastic within our everyday life would require more than an individual plastic footprint calculation. However for household level management awareness sessions usually are highly individual and household driven focusing on day to day products like Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Outside of our households and purview of current calculation, the significance of plastic and its management extends from industrial to employment generation, ease of accessibility, material life, durability, global trade, and international relations.

At the household level awareness sessions, the mode of action to tackle plastic waste is through the refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle approach.  This approach could be easily appealed to youngsters, layman, and encourage participation at an individual level. The success of such effort is either in collaboration of multiple agencies or an individual effort. However, this shouldn’t be mistaken as one sentence policy solution for plastic at international or national level. This is to ensure civic citizen participation at individual or household level to mobilize bottom up approach.

At the National level policy, the scale are towns, cities, states, and the entire country. The approach is slightly different. The policy explains it from centralized manner and progresses to decentralized units. The centralized and decentralized nature of waste management has been discussed in the sectoral trajectory[JS1] . The identifying features of Plastic waste management and handling from 2016 rules to the 2021 draft rules could be broken down into reducing and managing the plastic waste through removing certain items from day to day use, adding technical specificities to increase efficient resource recovery from plastic and ultimately checking what goes into our landfills.

Reduce, Refuse, Reuse and Recycle

Critically, the 2021 rules doesn’t indicate much on reducing plastic from day to day lives- except for banning of plastic stick based cotton ear buds from market. The concept of reduce or refuse to reuse and recycle remains at the core of the policy document without much emphasis within the document as this has been the driving point for most of the plastic waste management efforts.  The major focus in the document is on single use plastic. These are plastic found predominantly in each and every household, commercial or office spaces in form of wrappers, sachets and so on. In order to reduce the menace of handling these plastics which are unavoidable as well as difficult to recycle, the suggestions provided are to recycle them. Apart from the focus on reuse and recycle more so than reduce and refuse considering the myriad sections of society, economic strata and their behavioral and decision-making abilities to go for single use plastic, the next important point emerging from the draft rules is the focus to treat plastic waste before it reaches landfill- through the means of plasma pyrolysis technology in particular. This is done in order to reduce making new plastic and reduce pressure on existing hydrocarbon resources. The clarion call, if any, within the draft Plastic waste management rules 2021, to be enforced from 2022, is, for efficient treatment technologies to encourage resource recovery from plastic waste.

Plasma pyrolysis: Indian and Global scenario

Globally, European Union has considered four categories of plastic recycling and eight chemical recycling technologies, to conduct Technology Readiness Level (Solis and Silveira, 2019). The often referred technology options are cracking and gasification, pyrolysis, and plasma pyrolysis. The scale of their adoption varies from factory setting to lab scale setting. Plasma pyrolysis has seen success at lab scale whereas gasification has been adopted at industry scale. A comparative analysis over technical sophistication required states temperature range very high for plasma pyrolysis with nature of waste from homogenous to heterogeneous in nature. Although, 2021 the rules do not provide justification for selection of a technology over another technology, it states plasma pyrolysis as a probable treatment for plastic waste. Whether this has been suggested over gasification or not is not stated. It could only be inferred that the set-up of plasma pyrolysis plants is suggested as an upgrade to gasification or pyrolysis plants for waste treatment with the refuse set for manufacturing of next set of plastic rather than producing them from petroleum or hydrocarbons is prioritized in the draft 2021 rules. The earlier dialogue on waste to energy favored technologies on gasification. The setup, pilot and scale of the technology to treat plastic waste remain to achieve the successful scale for a Nation like India. The numbers and efficiency achieved are few. In India, we have considered the options of gasification and successful set up of plasma pyrolysis is to be witnessed. The other examples are of conventional gasification followed by condensation at Spain, thermal cracking at Japan, plasma and microwave assisted pyrolysis at lab scale, and conventional pyrolysis at Sevilla in Spain (Solis and Silveira, 2020).

Thickness of Single use plastic

The life cycle of plastic has been broken down into raw material production; manufacture and use; and disposal and end of life treatment as per UNPRI (2019). The manufacturing stage is where the focus of rules has been to bring forth significant environment friendly changes. As per the 2016 rules, and its amendment in 2018, the focus was on main ingredient of plastic material such as high polymer like polyethylene terephthalate, high density polyethylene vinyl, low density polyethylene polypropylene, polystyrene resins, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene polyphenylene oxide polycarbonate polybutyrate terephthalate. The most prominent point in the 2021 draft rule is the proposal to increase the thickness of single use plastic from 50 microns as stated in the 2016 rules to that of 60 microns in the 2021 (MoEFCC, 2021). The shift is from the constituents to physical property of the plastic. This change in thickness aims to increase resource recovery of the single use plastics such as wrappers. The justification for ‘ten’ micron increase is missing. Further, if the increase in thickness of the single use plastic is solely for plasma pyrolysis technology in the policy. The amendment in 2018 professed multilayer packaging and having at least one or more layer paper, paper based polymeric material, the plastic packaging was categorized as recyclable and non-recyclable fraction of plastic which cannot be recycled by conventional recycling methods or remolded (CPCB, 2018). Multilayered structure made from thermoset or thermoplastic is complex and hence non-recyclable-better barrier properties-used in industries such food, pharmaceutical and electronic goods.  So, overall in the current guideline there has been shift from material composition to the increase in thickness of the plastic material.

Landfills

Landfills and their management remain slightly underappreciated through the course of the policy on plastic waste.  The issue remains waste reaching landfill in segregated, and unsegregated form, handling and managing waste at the landfill site, skilled, trained and unskilled laborers, proliferation of unassigned spots due to lack of either picking up facility or designated collection points spread uniformly across all wards- leading to micro and mini sites of collection at least for a few days sporadically. All these issues have not received much attention in the draft rules and could potentially be needed to be addressed along with other waste categories ending up in landfill especially solid waste. The end life of plastic if to be diverted away from landfill is to end up at a waste for energy or resource recovery plant then it has to be duly accounted for in the policy framework for waste management inclusive of plastic waste.

2022 onwards

The set-up, function and success of plasma pyrolysis based facilities would be interesting to watch as the rules are enforced. The increase in the thickness of single use plastic and its contribution for resource recovery would be a challenge and also clarification whether we are ruling out existing, ‘Waste to energy’ set up based on previous technology.  Whether the enforcement of rules on single use leads to efficient resource recovery could only be assessed as the year and the rules progress from the draft to actual enforcement. The nodal points for waste management could be manufacturing reforms, collection, processing post use, diversion from landfills, and ways of envisioning landfills differently.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Dr. Naveen B Ramu and team at India chapter.in for reviewing the article.

Reference

Down to earth, (2021). Draft plastic waste management rules https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/waste/draft-plastic-waste-management-rules-2021-addressing-the-bigger-problem-75939

Central Pollution Control Board (2018). Guidelines of the disposal of non-recyclable fraction (Multi-layered) plastic waste. New Delhi

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Notification (2021) New Delhi

United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (2019). The plastics landscape: regulations, policies and influencers. New York.

Solis, M and Silveira, S (2019). Technologies for chemical recycling of household plastics review and TRL assessment. Waste management 105, 128-138

 

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