India generates at least 25,940 tonnes of plastic waste daily, equivalent to the weight of around 4,300 elephants. Of this, about 60% gets recycled, according to the Union environment ministry. The rest gets dumped in landfills, clogs drains, goes into the ocean as micro-plastics, or is burnt, leading to air pollution.
In the absence of a proper waste management system, the plastics that get recycled are often dirty, which makes the re-cycling process water-intensive and expensive.
“It is the process of cleaning the plastics before recycling that makes it resource intensive. A lot of water is required to wash the collected plastics, especially if it is oily or greasy as it has to be cleaned with a solvent,” said Dr Suneel Pandey, director of environment and waste management, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).
Experts say proper waste collection and management is at the core of ensuring more plastics get recycled instead of ending up in landfills and oceans.
“To make plastic eco-friendly we must make it more biodegradable. A lot of work is going on in bio-degradable plastics, but petroleum-derived plastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene are cheap and abundant. It is therefore necessary for investment in research to develop better plastics that are more efficiently biodegradable,” said Dr Pandey. Research on ways to degrade plastic that is already in the soil or landfills using microbial solutions is also needed, he said.
Read more of this in a report by Annona Dutt published in Hindustan Times... (Link given below)
