How Dubious Data, Fading Tech Shape India's Global Plastic Stance

The journey of “60%” is illustrative of the shaky foundations on which plastic policies stand.

In 2024, the Ministry of Broadcasting’s magazine, New India Samachar, announced that 60% of plastic was being recycled in India. The same figure was used by plastic manufacturers at a global meet on plastic recycling and sustainability. In 2023, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) used the same figure, citing “studies”.

In 2019, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) repeated the number, attributing it to a document by MoHUA. The document, an action plan for plastic waste management under the Swachh Bharat Mission, cited a presentation by a government plastics scientist at a 2018 United Nations conference on recycling.

Tracing “60%” further back, the figure appears multiple times between 2000-2023, in the over 5,600 pages of internal documents obtained from MoEF&CC through the Right To Information (RTI) Act. An early known use is in a November 2011 internal note by Deputy Director R.B. Lal, during discussions of the draft Plastic Waste Management Rules. In his note, Lal states that an estimate by CPCB in 2008 showed that 60% of plastic was recycled.

Pursuing that number through CPCB reports, we find the figure quoted in a 2009 study of plastic waste collection at airports and railway stations in Delhi. The authors attribute the figure to a journal run by the Indian Centre For Plastics in the Environment, a research centre founded by plastic manufacturers. Within this journal from January-March 2007, we find the figure in a slideshow presented at the 2007 Asia Pacific Conference on Recycling of Plastics, Mumbai, by Suijt Banerji, then President of the Polymer Business of Reliance Industries Limited and Executive Secretary of the ICPE. And it is likely that the figure predates even that.

In 2025, the 60% recycling rate is likely to form the cornerstone of India’s argument at the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations. Previous negotiations in Busan in 2024 ended in stalemate, with India and other petrochemical producing countries refusing to set limits on plastic manufacture. In Busan, as we reported in the first part of this series, India argued in favour of “downstream measures” such as recycling and reuse, on the grounds that restrictions on manufacture would threaten millions of workers dependent on plastics.

In this concluding part, we examine the data loopholes, downgraded technologies, and unfulfilled promises that further entrench the status quo.

Bad numbers and the 60% illusion

In a November 2024 letter to the UN Environment Programme, nine representatives from the United States Congress and the European Parliament warned against an overemphasis on plastic recycling instead of curbing plastic production. Highlighting the immense influence of the plastics lobby in the US and European policy-making, parliamentarians warned that the lobbies will use “disinformation” around recycling as a way to enforce the status quo.

These warnings ring especially true for India. Internal notes and submissions obtained from MoEF&CC show the use of figures and data that do not seem to be corroborated by independent studies.

For instance in 2010, a confidential note prepared by the Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals (DCPC) to the committee of secretaries (a committee of top bureaucrats that discusses inter-departmental policy-making) quoted a plastic recycling rate of 30%. No studies were cited. “Plastics are recyclable per se and not harmful to the environment…There is a need to develop awareness of recyclable properties of plastic,” DCPC said in the note written in the context of a proposed ban by the environment ministry. The ban, said DCPC, ran contrary to their aim of increasing plastic production.

By 2011, ministry notes began using 60% as the recycling rate when, in fact, India’s overall recycling rate is around 13%, close to the global average of around 9%, according to a 2019 report by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

This is not the only example of the use of faulty data to drive policy. A 2015 Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report studied 60 municipal landfills in 2010-11, and estimated that 6.92% of municipal waste comprises plastics and that 94% of these plastics is “recyclable”. The study was only conducted in urban landfills, and did not consider plastic waste generated by the 68% of the population that live in rural areas. Despite these lacunae, the study became the foundation in determining what Single-Use Plastic (SUP) items were to be banned in India in 2022.

The decade between the CPCB study and the SUP ban was one of phenomenal growth in plastic consumption. Consequently, CPCB’s data show that plastic waste generated increased by 150% between 2012 and 2022. Independent reports estimated that plastic waste grows by 20% annually.

Per capita annual consumption of plastics had doubled, from 5.2 kg per person to an estimated 15 kg now, which would imply that the country consumes an additional 15 million tonnes of plastic yearly compared to 2011.

The nature of consumption also changed drastically. The share of packaging (comprising everything from plastic wrappers, pouches, bottles, and food delivery containers) has increased from 48% to 59% in this time. CPCB’s study was conducted well before the boom in online food delivery and other online marketplace services.

There is increasing evidence that registered recycling infrastructure has not kept up with this increasing production. In 2022-23, the latest available annual report of the CPCB notes that registered recyclers had the capacity to process a quarter of the 3.9 million tonnes of plastic waste generated annually. Industry bodies assume that a significant percent is picked up by the informal sector.

India’s official waste generation rate is “probably underestimated and waste collection overestimated”, said researchers in a 2024 study in the journal, Nature. The study pegged India’s plastic waste generation at three times the official figures, making India the largest emitter of plastic pollution in the world. Unauthorised or unregulated dumpsites are at least 10 times more prevalent than the sanitary landfills where CPCB did their 2010-11 study.

An earlier study by researchers from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali estimated that nearly 40% of plastic waste was burnt in India.

Pooja Chaudhary, a researcher with aerosol research group at IISER Mohali and the lead author for the study, says, “There is no system to collect this waste from rural areas or even from slums in big cities. This unaccounted waste is dumped and then set on fire for disposal,” she said.

Calling the 60% recycling figure “doubtful”, Sadhan Kumar Ghosh, founder and President, International Society of Waste Management, Air and Water (ISWMAW) said: “Using outdated data will add unnecessary pressure on legislation, including creation of unrealistic targets for collection and recycling. The policy ends up chasing wrong priorities.”

The inequities within plastics

Efforts to fix recycling and collection rates culminated in the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy spelt out in the 2016 Plastic Waste Management Rules. Producers, Importers, and Brand Owners (collectively PIBO, which encompasses anyone profiting from the production of plastics) were held to be financially responsible for processing plastic waste equivalent to what they produce.

The mechanism is beset by lack of registrations and creation of fake certificates. The policy however does not require processing specific plastic types. The loophole meant that PIBOs can purchase credit from recyclers processing any form of plastic, allowing them to choose high-value, easily collected rigid plastics over difficult multilayered plastics (MLPs), which remain difficult to manage due to their low weight, high volume and higher proportion in mixed-waste (that is, contamination with food waste or electronic waste)

Between April 2022 and August 2024, India produced 47.76 million tonnes (MT) of plastic, but only had the capacity to recycle 19.64 MT. According to the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), rigid plastics had a 93% recycling capacity, while flexible packaging and MLPs languished at 24%. This implies that 58% of produced plastic was potentially being recycled, as per the Centre for Science and Environment’s EPR Portal Insights report that analysed data from this period.

“The system was created to target MLPs. But it clearly failed to do so,” said Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, programme manager at CSE who authored the report.

Even industry bodies recognise this as a concern. “The lack of effective technology for removal of reverse printed ink & metallization...contaminates the recyclate, thereby imparting grey colour and rendering it non-usable. Virgin material is usually cheaper than recycled plastic,” says a white paper by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), India’s largest business association.

In general, collecting rigid plastics is profitable while recyclers face a loss of around Rs 16 per kg when recycling MLPs, said Lubna Anantakrishnan, managing trustee of Kashtakari Panchayat, a Pune-based waste-picker organisation. FMCGs pay Rs 4-5 per kg for recycled MLP waste while the cost of recycling (including picking up waste) works out to Rs 20-21 per kg.

“Recycling MLPs is labour-intensive and it is complex to collect. Every brand uses their own formula with varying proportions of polymer and adhesive. The proportions are kept secret by the company. When we don’t know the quantity of material used, we don’t pick it up,” said Lubna.

One solution could be standardised packaging across companies, another hot button topic at the Global Plastic Treaty negotiations. India supports better plastic product design to improve recyclability and reuse, but says that it can’t be imposed on any country without adequate technological and financial support needed to implement the designs.

The recycling myth

Even when plastics are collected, true circularity is rare. Recycling doesn’t mean the end of life for the plastic. Even the oft-quoted 2015 CPCB report mentions that plastics can be recycled only 3-4 times before its quality degrades to the point that it can’t be repurposed.

“Downcycled products such as black polythenes are of no value. They are not even collected. In effect, recycled products don’t even enter the value chain,” said Pooja Chaudhary, the IISER researcher.

A 2021 report estimates that only 5% of India’s collected plastics is channeled back to the formal economy and can be used instead of virgin plastic. The rest are downgraded to low-grade materials (downcycled), which “quickly add to the country’s growing amounts of mismanaged plastic waste”.

Recycling of PET bottles--which are omnipresent in markets in bottled water, juices, oils, sodas and others--illustrates this. The 2019 DCPC expert committee report on single-use plastics had recommended the ban on plastic water bottles below 200 ml as they had little utility but “adverse” environmental impact. However, in the MoEF&CC action plan, PET bottles were left out of the purview “as a large quantum” of the bottles reach the recycling industry already.

Figures for collection of PET bottles given by industry associations in their presentations to the MoEF&CC range from 65-90% (again, without independent studies to back this). Experts believe these collections to be more robust in cities and less so in eco-sensitive areas, the Himalayan states, and rural areas.

However, when the ban on importing PET waste was imposed in 2019 (in the hope of spurring the domestic recycling industry), industries successfully petitioned for the ban to be lifted. Recyclers could not get enough waste domestically. In 2025, the government’s mandate to use 30% recycled PET waste in the manufacture of new PET bottles is being met with similar opposition: recycled PET is scarce in the domestic market.

“PET bottles are converted into fiber and used in polyester clothing and soft toys. Eventually, these degrade as microplastics or are repurposed to plastic irrigation pipes that aren’t recycled,” said Dharmesh Shah, senior campaigner (plastics treaty) with the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

At the Global Plastics Treaty, over 200 global NGOs have written to delegates seeking curbs in the manufacture of PET bottles as they were the “driver[s] of plastic pollution”.

Burn it: The rise of waste-to-energy

India’s fallback for plastic disposal has been incineration.

The idea of Waste to Energy (WTE) plants has been floating around for decades, with the first such plant being briefly operational in Delhi in 1986. After several such plants closed down, a Task Force formed in 2014 found that all eight existing WTE plants were on the verge of closure due to several factors, including “want of required quantity and quality of waste”.

This, however, did not stop WTE being used to dilute plastic bans in India. For instance, in 2017 and 2018, when the deadline for the ban of non-recyclable multi-layer plastics was looming, several industries and associations highlighted WTE.

“Energy Recover from MLPs would substitute the equivalent quantity of fossil fuel which would have been used for cement manufacturing or production of electricity,” said Hindustan Unilever, India’s largest Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company, in a letter to the MoEF&CC in December 2017. Waste to Energy would also “solve the problem of piling up of wastes in landfills”, it added.

At the time Hindustan Lever--which uses MLPs in a majority of its products--made the claim, India had just four WTE plants with a combined processing capacity of 5,300 tonnes of plastic waste, or less than 0.15% of the estimated plastic production.

This was acknowledged even by DCPC, which in a 2019 internal note on the ban of single use plastics, noted that the ‘alternate use' and ‘energy recovery’ processes “had not yet matured”. But the promise of the technology was enough for MoEF&CC to revoke the ban and to place renewed emphasis on WTE, co-processing in cement plants (whose incinerators burn Refuse-Derived fuel) and use in road construction.

CPCB’s data from 2021-22 show that these co-processing technologies cumulatively process 237,000 tonnes of waste, or just 6% of the annual plastic production.

“India operates very few WTE plants and they struggle to operate at capacity because they struggle to get good quality plastic waste. Segregation of waste at source is poor and there is high moisture content in these plastics, which affects incineration,” said Pooja Chaudhary, the researcher from IISER, Mohali.

Even if India were to have a comprehensive waste incineration system, the environmental impact could be immense. Burning one tonne of plastic releases one tonne of carbon dioxide, which Choudhary says is worse than emissions from coal generating plants.

“Waste to Energy has effectively legalised carbon emissions in India,” said Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran, senior associate at the Centre for Financial Accountability. In 2022-23 alone, WTE plants in Delhi processed 7,250 tonnes of waste--nearly seven times more than the estimated to be “suitable” for incinerators.

“They end up emitting more pollutants than a thermal power plant,” Kulasekaran said. “Moreover, the process leaves ash--up to 30% of the quantity of used waste--which needs to be put in secured landfills.”

Investigative reports have found that one million people living around one such WTE plant in Delhi were exposed to toxic pollution.

The promotion of these processes as the End of Life (that is, removing plastics permanently from the environment) is a contentious point at the Global Plastics Treaty. Several advocacy and research organisations have written to negotiators against incineration as a waste management option.

“Plastic mitigation resembles carbon reduction or sequestration, except that most stakeholders do not want to see plastic burned or gasified for energy,” writes the Ocean Recovery Alliance.

“The treaty must not resolve the plastic pollution crisis at the expense of our other planetary crises: our climate emergency, biodiversity collapse, and pollution,” says the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

A road to nowhere

When Bengaluru-based activist Almitra Patel petitioned the Supreme Court in 1999, it helped bring about India’s first plastic waste rules. Now, Patel says, “Transforming multilayer plastics into recyclable monolayers faces massive industry resistance." Removing these complex structures from the environment has become a challenge.

She dismisses WTE and waste-to-oil solutions as polluting and inefficient. “The only option left is road construction--but we can't build enough roads to absorb the volume of plastic.”

In 2020, the National Highway Authority of India committed to laying 750 km of road per year utilising 1,800 tonnes of plastic waste. However, the technology for road laying needs a specific quality of plastic material. A year later, in a follow-up meeting, the Ministry of Highways and Road transport said that “availability of plastic waste of the requisite standard had been a challenge.”

This is part of a consistent pattern of India’s plastic policies that relies on the promise of future technologies to mitigate the waste of today. Another example is expediting compostable and biodegradable plastics in India to counter the loss of plastic products after the government's plastic bans.

As early as 2010, DCPC noted that these plastics needed to be collected as they degraded only in certain conditions. Between 2016 and 2022, the certified capacity of compostable plastics has increased from nil to 340,000 tonnes per annum--but only 15,238 tonnes have been recycled or disposed of until now.

Compostable plastics need dedicated industrial units with constant temperature and pressure, and even then, they take 120-150 days to fully degrade, K. Nagaiah, Chief Scientist at CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), explained. There is no difference in the additives--such as plasticisers, flame retardants, stabilisers and oil repellants--used for fossil fuel-based plastics and bioplastics, he added. “Some of the additives are really harmful,” he explained, citing the examples of Bisphenol A, a known endocrine disruptor, and PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), forever chemicals used to repel grease and oil which can potentially cause childhood obesity and cancers.

Nonetheless, MoEF&CC sought to increase their production, easing obligations under the SUP ban by allowing banned items if made from compostable or biodegradable plastics.

NITI Aayog, the Union government’s public policy think-tank, cautioned against this. “It is challenging to promote widespread adoption of compostable plastic,” it said in a May 2022 report. “Compostable plastics cannot be recycled; if they make it to a recycling facility, they may end up contaminating the plastic that could have been recycled. Hence, the EPR exemption on compostable plastics should be removed and they should be brought under EPR.”

IndiaSpend reached out to the MoEF&CC and CPCB for comment on the scientific basis behind the 60% recycling rate and their claims that WTE plants release no harmful emissions. We will update this story when we receive a response.

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