The Plastics Problem

Over the years, consumer-goods makers have harnessed single-use plastic to turbocharge profits. The book investigates how plastic makers used disposability as a business model, convincing brand owners to pivot away from reusables

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In 1990, the average Indian consumed 0.7 kilograms of plastic a year. That compared with 100kg in the US and a world average of 12kg.

Despite the lack of formal recycling programs, the culture in India had long been to reuse or recycle things. Every household that got newspapers kept them in neat piles to sell to raddiwalas—scrap collectors - who in turn sold them on for recycling. Used clothes were mended or traded in for stainless steel kitchenware, while old saris were turned into curtains and cushion covers. Ghee tins were used to store spices, while old calendars were used to wrap textbooks. Cooking oil was used more than once, fruit peels were turned into face masks, bones and scraps were fed to pets, livestock or neighbourhood strays, and shoes were handed down.

Outside the home, tea was dispensed in tiny clay pots, freshly fried snacks were served on pieces of newspaper, and rice and lentils were sold in jute bags. Fast-food restaurants selling dosas and idlis used washable steel plates. In villages, farmers wore sandals fashioned out of used cart tyres.

Door-to-door pushcart vendors sold fresh, unwrapped vegetables every day. Weddings served thousands of guests on banana leaves. Soft drinks came in returnable glass bottles — people milled about to drink them outside shops before handing back the containers. Office workers ate home-cooked meals from steel tiffin boxes—an elaborate network of dabbawalas collected and returned the containers to people’s homes so that white-collar workers didn't need to tote the multi-compartment dabbas to and from work.

But by the late 1980s India’s culture was quickly changing.