The India Plastics Pact is an ambitious, collaborative initiative that aims to bring together businesses, governments and NGOs across the whole value chain to set time-bound commitments to reduce plastics from their value chains.
The Pact aims to transform the current linear plastics system into a circular plastics economy that will:
•To eliminate unnecessary and problematic plastic packaging through redesign and innovation
•To ensure all plastic packaging is reusable or recyclable
•To increase the reuse, collection, and recycling of plastic packaging
•To increase recycled content in plastic packaging.
The India Plastics Pact aims to promote public-private collaborations that enable solutions to eliminate the plastics we do not need, bring innovation to packaging design, and to capture the value of the plastics we use.
The vision, targets and ambition of the India Plastics Pact are aligned with the circular economy principles of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy.
Why does India need a Plastics Pact?
- 9.46million tonnes of plastic waste India generates annually.
- 40 %plastic waste goes uncollected.
- 43% of all plastics produced in India are used for packaging, majority of them being single-use.
How will it work?
- The Pact will create a unified national framework for a circular economy for plastics with aligned targets and associated reporting.
- It will provide a platform for collaboration, learning and tangible action.
- All stakeholders will support a joint set of ambitious and time-bound targets, ensuring that this collaboration will drive significant change by 2030.
Advantages of the Pact:
- It is expected to boost demand for recycled content.
- Increase investment in recycling infrastructure
- Creation of jobs directly as well as indirectly
- Formalisation of informal sector engaged in plastic waste collection
- It will support the Extended Producer •Responsibility framework of the government and improve solid waste management as envisioned in the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
- Will ensure access to expertise and knowledge from different Pacts worldwide
- This will lead to significant reduction of Greenhouse gases
Supporting the Plastics Pact
WWF India and CII call on stakeholders from across the plastics value chain to join, support and take steps towards a circular economy. The India Plastics Pact will align with Plastics Pacts around the world, which share the same overarching vision: to change the way plastics are designed, used, and reused to transition to a circular economy where plastics never become waste.
The Indian Plastics Pact will also build on the positive work started by other initiatives and help scale up and disseminate good practice more.
Why does plastic waste need to be managed?
A 2019 report by the Center for International Environment Law suggests that by 2050 Greenhouse Gas emission from plastic could reach over 56 gigatonnes. Similarly, the report Closing the Plastics Circulatory Gap by Google suggests that without a large-scale intervention we will be mismanaging more than 7.7 billion metric tonnes of plastic waste globally in the next 20 years.
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