Sealed With Trouble

Faulty policies have allowed industries to use multilayered plastic packages without the responsibility of retrieving them

- Dinesh Raj Bandela And Swati Singh Sambyal

HAVE YOU wondered what happens to the wrapper of a biscuit packet once you discard it? It stays in the environment forever because ragpickers do not pick it up and the producers do not have a plan to meet their extended producer responsibility (EPR ) to retrieve it from the open. The government too does not have a clue how to deal with these packets which are indestructible and add to garbage dumps. Such wrappers are made of multilayered plastic (MLP ). Mostly, MLP packets have two sheets of plastic enclosing a layer of aluminium, but technically MLP can be any material that has at least one layer of plastic.

What makes the problem worse is the sheer volume of MLP waste. Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GALA ), an international alliance of non-profits and grassroots groups in over 90 countries, undertook a study in May 2018 in 250 sites across 15 cities in India and found that 53 per cent of plastic waste in the cities was MLP . “Due to low source segregation and lack of continuous supply of MLP to the industries, it is not recycled,” says Pratibha Sharma, Indian Coordinator-GALA.