Dear govt, you can't burn your way out of a plastic crisis

Time of India

28-04-2025

CHENNAI: As part of the 2025-26 budget, the state govt announced two
waste-to-energy
(
WTE
) incineration plants in Kodungaiyur and
Tambaram
with a capacity of 21MW and 15-18MW electricity generation from solid waste.
The WTE at Kodungaiyur dump yard is to be set up at an estimated life-cycle cost of Rs 3,450cr. At the same time, the govt launched a year-long
plastic
waste clean-up and recycling drive that began on Jan 25. While these solutions are projected to solve the growing solid waste problem, it ignores the elephant in the room — the fact that Chennai is the leader in plastic production and consumption in south India.
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Though the world is shifting towards renewables and electric vehicles, fossil fuel industries are banking on plastics for profits. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2050, plastics and petrochemicals will drive 50% of oil and 58% of gas demand growth. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warns that plastic production could triple by 2060. Without curbing production, govts worldwide are left spending $32 billion annually on managing plastic waste.
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This pattern of global contradictory measures which just focus on the plastic issue as a waste management problem and not an upstream problem manifests in
Tamil Nadu
in two concrete projects. The first is the plan to set up a 243.78 acre polymer industrial park exclusively for housing plastic and allied industries in Tiruvallur district at `216cr. The second is the state-incentivised doubling of Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited's (CPCL) capacity to 19.5 million metric tons per annum from the current 10.5 million metric tons per annum in Nagapattinam while pumping in thousands of crores of public money to set up WTEs.
The govt is simultaneously encouraging industries that will increase pollution while investing huge public money to manage the environmental fallout. Thus, the state risks becoming a sacrifice zone for this unsustainable model of waste management.
Tamil Nadu is in a dire situation. Its plastic waste generation is startling. As plastic production rises, so does municipal solid waste, with plastic remaining the hardest material to manage.TN produced 7.82 lakh tonnes plastic waste in the 2022-23 financial year, nearly 50% higher than Delhi. Once established, together, the polymer industries park and Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd's expansion, will worsen the plastic crisis in the state.
CPCL's existing 30,000 MT/year propylene plant enables production of about 3.4 billion plastic carry bags annually. With CPCL's capacity doubling to 19.5 MMTPA and the Polymer Park creating new demand for plastic feedstocks, this output will scale significantly.
The proposed solutions are basically flawed as they are downstream. They focus only on managing plastic waste generated after use rather than regulating its feedstock production. WTE plants require constant plastic waste flows to remain operational, creating contrary economic incentives against plastic production reduction.
The Meendum Manjapai (MM) cloth bag initiative shifts the responsibililty onto individuals while ignoring industrial-scale plastic production, enabled by state-subsidised projects such as CPCL's expansion and the Polymer Park. Without regulating feedstock production, individual efforts will have little impact, giving industries a free hand for surplus production. A committed action against plastic pollution regulating feedstock production along with individual-centric measures is needed.
A recent investigation on a 10-tonne waste incinerator in Manali, Chennai, indicated that cadmium levels, a carcinogen, were 24 times higher than WHO standards apart from revealing that they were operating illegally for five years. Building two new WTE incinerators that will be 360 times bigger than the
Manali
incinerator will be catastrophic to Chennai's environment and climate.
The health and environment is at risk of contamination as incinerators are known to emit harmful pollutants such as PM10, PM2.5, SOx, NOx, HCL, heavy metals, dioxins and furans. Also, the proposed WTE incinerators in Chennai will emit about 6,120 tonnes of CO2 per day which is equivalent to the emissions from a little more than 15 lakh passenger cars.
Globally, the communities around WTEs have reported poor environment quality and poor health. A recent NewYork Times investigative article on the Delhi's Okhla WTE plant has found severe health impacts including congenital anomalies, miscarriages, respiratory illnesses, and cancer. To sustainably solve the plastic issue, the TN govt requires upstream interventions. First, the state must scrap its persistence in establishing the polymer industrial park in Thiruvallur despite facing opposition from local communities. Instead, it needs to invest in developing environmentally and people friendly alternative models. A legally binding Global Plastics Treaty, is currently being negotiated under the aegis of the UN, for addressing plastics pollution across its entire life-cycle. As an industrial leader in the country, TN should advocate for national plastic production caps which will reduce the amount of plastics that is manufactured in the country thereby addressing the plastic pollution effectively.
Even the plastic waste management (PWM) rules have been diluted eight times in the last eight years to remove any ambition for the phasing out of problematic plastics and single-use plastics. The extended producer responsibility (EPR) guidelines of the PWM rules have instead legalised and incentivised the burning of all types of plastics via WTE incineration and co-processing in cement industries. Kerala has already shown that successful models exist to handle waste without need for WTEs. Kerala recently became a near 100% waste-free status as 1,021 local bodies meet key criteria.
The choice facing TN requires political courage to confront the powerful fossil fuel lobby and acknowledge the bitter fact that plastic waste is generated in state- and corporate-owned petrochemical industries and not in household backyards. The ₹3,450cr earmarked for Kodungaiyur WTE plant in the 2025-26 budget could be redirected to seed a circular economy strengthening the livelihoods of people involved in recovery, recycle and reuse sectors. TN has a bright ecological future if it divests from plastics feedstock production. Contrastingly, if the state focuses on expanding plastic production on one hand and promoting false solutions such as WTE incineration will bring an unprecedented waste-o-calypse to Tamil Nadu.
(The writers are associated with the Centre for Financial Accountability and work on impacts of plastics on the environment)