Fighting the Plastic War

India generates over 10mn tonne of plastic waste annually. To just contain this amount of waste, we would need to build a landfill nine times the size of the Taj Mahal, every year! It gets worse.

- RAMNATH VAIDYANATHAN

This quantity is expected to triple by 2060 with about 40% coming just from packaging.

The Union government, to its credit, has acknowledged this and has created one of the most stringent rules on plastic-waste management—Plastic Waste Management (Amendment) Rules, 2022—in the world, which requires companies to collect or pay to collect and recycle plastic packaging waste equivalent to 100% of the plastic they put out, and also incorporate 10-60% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic (depending on the category and increasing year-on-year) in their packaging starting 2026.

On the face of it, the rules emphasise recycling and reuse, but indirectly, they also incentivise companies to eliminate problematic plastics from their packaging and explore alternatives to plastic in packaging, be it in material, design or even distribution models.

Showing the Way

At Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL), we have reduced our plastic packaging intensity by over 20% since 2020. It simply means that for every tonne of product we produce, we now use 20% less plastic than we did in 2020. This was one of the internal targets we took that looked beyond compliance, which was led by multiple teams, from manufacturing teams reducing line wastage to R&D and brand teams redesigning packaging to use lesser plastic.