Uncollected Waste At The Heart Of India’s Plastic Crisis

We feed on our own rot, and we live on top of our own detritus. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that India generates the highest plastic pollution in the world. Researchers from the University of Leeds paint a detailed picture of how and where the macroplastic emissions--bigger than 5 mm--are released into the environment from different activities and systems.

The researchers define emissions as materials that have moved from the managed or mismanaged system--that is, the controlled or contained state--to the unmanaged system or the uncontrolled/uncontained state, the environment.

They estimate India’s annual plastic emissions at 9.3 million metric tonnes--or about 930,000 truckloads (at 10 tonnes per truck)--accounting for about 18% of all global plastic emissions. If these trucks were to be lined up, they would span the length of India’s golden quadrilateral of national highways connecting New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

This waste piles up in landfills, chokes drains and rivers and flows into the sea where it is ingested by marine animals. It leaches into the soil and groundwater, contaminating the natural environment with poisonous dioxins, as IndiaSpend reported earlier.

The consequences of mismanaged waste, including plastics, to human health have become a silent and toxic crisis, killing between 400,000 and 1 million people each year in low- and middle-income countries. Worldwide, one to five trillion plastic bags are consumed annually, as IndiaSpend reported in June 2021. If tied together, five trillion single-use plastic bags would cover an area twice the size of France.

Waste collection gap biggest contributor

“We found that uncollected waste is the largest source of plastic pollution globally,” Josh Cottom, the lead author of the study, tells IndiaSpend in an email. He is a research fellow in the School of Civil Engineering with a focus on plastic pollution, solid waste management and informal sector recycling.

In his research, he focuses on quantifying sources and pathways of plastic pollution.

Although previous work had highlighted that potentially billions of people across the world do not have waste collection services, Cottom says, “Our work shows the true scale of uncollected waste and its contribution towards plastic pollution--accounting for an astonishing 68% of all plastic entering the environment.”

While they knew that uncollected waste is a major source, Cottom says, they were “surprised to understand just how important a source it truly is”.

Globally, more than 52 million metric tonnes (Mt) of plastic waste moves into the environment every year, and about 70% of it comes from just 20 countries. While India is at the top of the polluters’ list at 9.3 Mt of its plastic waste discharging into the environment, it is followed by Nigeria, which produces 3.5 Mt per year, Indonesia with 3.4 Mt per year and China with 2.8 Mt per year.

India’s highest plastic pollution is, according to Cottom, “a consequence of having a high population but also having many areas without waste collection coverage”.

More broadly, the researchers say, littering is the largest emission source in the Global North, whereas uncollected waste is the dominant emissions source across the Global South.

The where and how of plastic waste

Cottom explains that they used solid waste management data such as waste generation rates and the amount of plastic in waste to train a machine learning model by relating the data to the socioeconomics of the area. The model was then able to predict the waste management data for areas where no data exist, therefore allowing them to produce the first comprehensive local-level database of solid waste management across the world.

“It was these predictions that we use to map the flows of waste, including understanding how much plastic enters the environment.”

The researchers used solid waste management data to train a machine learning model by relating the data to the socioeconomics of the area.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07758-6

The researchers found that India’s dumpsites--uncontrolled land disposal--outnumber sanitary landfills by 10 to 1. Despite India’s claims of national waste collection coverage of 95%, “there is evidence that official statistics do not include rural areas, open burning of uncollected waste or waste recycled by the informal sector”, they wrote.

“This means that India’s official waste generation rate (approximately 0.12 kg per capita per day) is probably underestimated and waste collection overestimated,” the paper says. A more probable waste generation rate for India is 0.54 kg per capita per day, according to the paper.

According to the researchers, India’s collection coverage is 81%. They explain that nearly 53% of the country’s plastic waste emissions--comprising 30% debris and 23% open burning--come from the 255 million people or 18% of the population whose waste is uncollected. Overall, they estimate that 56.8 Mt of municipal solid waste is openly burned in India; of that, 5.8 Mt is plastic.

By using machine learning and probabilistic material flow analysis, they identified emission hotspots from among 50,702 municipalities globally.

The study is important because in order to address this huge problem, governments, policy makers and citizens need to have an understanding of how much plastic waste is produced and where it is moving. Furthermore, the study assumes an added significance in the context of producing a global treaty on ending plastic pollution.

In March, 2022, 175 nations agreed to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024, as per a United Nations press note. The deliberations are expected to be completed by December 2024. The UN resolution addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.

How the nature of plastic makes it intractable

Because plastic is non-biodegradable, its pollution is not amenable to clean-ups in a sustainable way. Most noteworthy among these avenues to treating are pyrolysis, which is a process of transforming plastic waste into energy, into solid, liquid and gaseous fuels, as also landfilling and recycling.

Plastic recycling is a myth, according to a Greenpeace report. Recycling strategies suffer from greenwashing.

“Over 400 million metric tons of plastic waste are generated globally each year, resulting in pollution and lost resources. Recycling strategies can recapture this wasted material, but there is a lack of quantitative and transparent data on the capabilities and impacts of these processes,” according to a 2023 study in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Recycling might be causing toxic chemicals to end up in consumer products. According to an October 2024 study in the journal Chemosphere, the ubiquitous black plastic items such as sushi trays, casings and many others contain toxic flame-retardant chemicals which are linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, neurological problems, reproductive and development problems.

The other option of disposing of plastic waste is landfills, which are major sources of plastic losses to the environment. An estimated 79% of the total plastic waste ends up in landfills and is lost to the environment, according to a 2020 study. In this study, Vinay Yadav, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and his colleagues propose a conceptual framework “for quantitatively estimating plastics losses from landfills and open dumps through all possible pathways”.

The ways plastic gets into the environment include environmental processes like wind, rain, flooding, leaching and runoff; animals removing and scattering plastics, and people rummaging through dumps.

“By mapping the losses at different stages, we can have a better understanding of what’s causing the losses, and formulate policies to set it right,” Yadav tells IndiaSpend.

In another study published in December 2022, Yadav and colleagues detail the risk assessment they performed in 496 large cities across India. They say that 11% of the cities have severe or very high risk of plastic losses.

According to the paper, cities like Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata are at severe and very high risk levels out of the 496 Indian cities analysed. They say that “severe and very high risk levels include either coastal cities with relatively higher precipitation and wind speeds or populous inland cities with relatively higher plastics waste generation”.

“Our results are consistent with expectations, as cities at a severe level are metropolitan coastal cities that receive high rainfall, high wind speed, and high flood frequency. In contrast, cities in low or very low categories have relatively less population and lie in tranquil climates with much less precipitation and wind velocity,” they note.

Based on data analysis of wind, precipitation, and flooding, they say that 56 (11%) cities are at the severe hazard level. The level includes coastal cities such as Mumbai, Port Blair, and Visakhapatnam, which receive high rainfall and relatively high wind speed throughout the year. Further, 206 (42%) cities are in the very high hazard level, which is more diverse and spatially distributed and includes cities from the south (Tiruchirappalli), north (Panchkula), east (Asansol), and west (Veraval) of India.

They note that a major portion of landfills are affected by high precipitation or winds with velocities higher than the threshold value--3.5 m/s--that can lead to environmental losses of plastics.

“The frequency of such extreme weather events is likely to increase in the future due to climate change that can convert many cities from very high level to severe level,” they say.

Policies to address plastic pollution

Yadav and his colleagues suggest measures such as plastic reuse; situating landfills far from water bodies and flood-prone areas; fencing, and soil covering landfills, among others.

As per the government’s August 2021 notification, the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of single-use plastic commodities, including polystyrene and expanded polystyrene, was to be prohibited with effect from July 1, 2022.

The ban encompasses earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons, plastic flags, candy sticks, icecream sticks, polystyrene (Thermocol) for decoration, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery such as forks, spoons, knives, stirrers and straws, trays, wrapping or packing films around sweet boxes, invitation cards, cigarette packets, and plastic or PVC banners less than 100 micron.

Three months later, little had moved on the ground. IndiaSpend had found several banned plastic items in circulation in market places, eateries and other public places in Delhi and Mumbai, and a few were found in circulation in Bengaluru as well. Vendors had told us that there has neither been any punitive action nor any advisory to stop using these products, and that in fact, these products are available wholesale as usual.

A comprehensive set of guidelines on Extended Producer Responsibility, targeting at making the biggest plastic polluters clean up their mess, were issued in 2022. But the rules will do little to end hazardous plastic waste, IndiaSpend reported in October 2022.

Only a proportion of producers, importers and brand owners have registered on a centralised portal that would track their plastic collection and recycling targets. While these targets are set by the government, they are based on the self-declared volume of plastic manufactured or imported by those brands. Further, achievement of these targets will be certified by recyclers, which might leave room for corruption. Companies also have the option of purchasing credits if they fail to meet their targets, which might lead to lax implementation, we had reported.

Yadav says the bigger problem in waste management in India is policy implementation and technology adoption. “We need to have appropriate technology to address the problem and policies and rules that can be enforced.”

If macroplastics, larger than 5 mm in size, are this difficult to clean up from the environment, microplastics--plastic nurdles, flakes, fibres less 5 mm in size--are at a different order of difficulty. And the window of opportunity to address the issue is fast closing.

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