Plastic pollution and the uneven burden of compliance

Hindustan Times

05-06-2025

It was August 2022, a few days after India had banned single-use plastics. We were in a small town in eastern Uttar Pradesh and had ordered food from a local dhaba. The delivery person from the dhaba arrived late, holding out a flimsy paper container that had collapsed in the summer heat.
'The food spilled on the way,' he said apologetically. 'They banned plastic, but no one told us what to use instead. Paper tears. Those new boxes are too expensive.'
His frustration was quiet but sharp. What we had seen as a progressive environmental move suddenly felt like a burden unfairly passed on. The ban was bold, but the policy gap was clear, and the cost was being paid by people with the least alternatives.
This incident made us realise: people don't resist change because they lack awareness. They resist it when the system makes doing the right thing harder than doing nothing. We often expect individual discipline to make up for institutional failure. But when a plastic-free life requires constant effort and expense, and plastic use is cheap and easy, what real choice are we offering?
Behaviour, after all, isn't isolated. It follows design. If we want people to choose differently, the system must make that choice easier. As behavioural economists remind us, the architecture around a decision shapes the decision itself. In India's plastic story, that architecture still lags behind our ambitions.
This is where solution design matters. More than bans, we need to focus on what replaces plastic and how those alternatives are priced, distributed, reused, and recovered. What is their environmental and financial footprint? And how does it compare across materials?
Some places have struck this balance by engineering sustainability into daily life. Indore, for example, has been ranked India's cleanest city for seven years. Its success rests on a multi-layered approach that includes segregation at source, door-to-door collection, real-time tracking, and processing infrastructure that functions like clockwork. The brilliance lies in making good behaviour feel ordinary, because the system supports it at every step.
In South Korea, a 'Pay As You Throw' system charges households based on the amount of non-recyclable waste they generate. General waste is placed in specially marked bags, but food waste is weighed in RFID-enabled bins that calculate disposal fees in real time. These systems reshape waste behaviour through pricing, feedback, and infrastructure – not moral appeals.
While reducing plastic use is crucial, it's just as important to manage its full lifecycle. Plastic isn't going away anytime soon. What matters now is how we manage it better? Take Germany and the Netherlands. They each use 30 to 50 kg of plastic per person annually, yet very little ends up unmanaged. What sets them apart is not lower consumption, but tighter systems with clear rules and infrastructure that close the loop.
In contrast, India produced about 10.8 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2023 (roughly 7.6 kg per person). An estimated 70% of this was mismanaged, leading to serious environmental leakage. Our policy response needs to move beyond bans and tackle system design. For instance, a cotton tote used twice can have a higher footprint than a plastic bag reused ten times. Even biodegradable materials can do harm if not processed properly.
In a country as diverse as India, we need to understand whether interventions are working, which ones work best, and in what context. This requires a new data infrastructure, one that's localised, adaptive, and built for course correction. Across our work in WASH, sustainability, and rural livelihoods, we've found that the most effective interventions combine behavioural nudges with real-time data. But these insights don't come from top-down metrics. They come from proximity to context.
As our economy grows and consumption patterns shift, we need to look at plastic through a new lens, one that moves beyond compliance. A national plastic impact taxonomy could help shift the focus from intent to measurable outcomes, and help answer critical questions: How much plastic is being kept out of ecosystems? How strong are reuse and recovery systems? How resilient is our local waste infrastructure?
This could begin with piloting a Plastic Impact Index at the district level, co-developed with state pollution boards. A national repository of material footprint data could help compare alternatives more effectively across states and sectors.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) offers another promising blueprint, but its enforcement often falters without data or feedback loops. While formal recovery systems have made some headway in cities, they're largely missing in rural and peri-urban India. The FMCG sector – among the biggest contributors to plastic packaging, continues to operate with thin accountability. This gap undermines the real-world promise of EPR.
To strengthen the system, recovery targets should be linked to where plastic waste actually ends up. If a product is consumed in a small town, responsibility for collecting that waste shouldn't fall through the cracks simply because it's outside a metro. Making plastic traceable via QR codes or verified recovery slips, can help close the loop and add transparency to a system that is still blurry.
FMCG companies also need to invest in recovery infrastructure, especially where formal systems don't exist. An adaptive taxonomy, powered by contextualised, ground-level data, can enable smarter course correction, while publicly. Publicly accessible EPR dashboards would bring accountability, revealing which companies are meeting their targets and which are not. Combined with stronger local checks, EPR can move from being a rulebook to a real tool for building circular and inclusive systems.
That story from eastern UP is a reminder that plastic pollution doesn't unfold the same way everywhere. In some places, it clogs village drains. In others, it seeps into rivers or piles onto landfills. Different communities face different versions of the problem, often with fewer resources and less control over the systems meant to serve them. When policies treat all places the same, they risk leaving many behind. What we need instead are flexible systems that default to equity and are designed around people's lived realities.
We don't need a perfect system. We need a better one, one that makes the right choice the easier one.
This article is authored by Anubrata Basu, deputy vice president, research and communication and Abhishek Sharma, deputy vice president, research, Sambodhi Research & Communications.