A Lot of Trash, Nowhere to Go
Over the course of two weeks traveling across India, I encountered an abundance of beauty. Ancient royal palaces, historic temples, glistening beaches, modern skylines – India boasts a rich, diverse culture with art, intoxicating smells, and an energy that inspires all who live there and visit. Yet, behind this beauty lies a growing challenge that’s both local and global in nature: pervasive plastic waste, and a lack of infrastructure to address it.
My true mission for visiting India was to see and better understand the impact global plastic consumption has on a country that still lacks basic waste infrastructure. I visited sections of major cities where plastic dumpsites lay smoking from improvised incineration, overflowing landfills sit idle with disease-carrying insects, polluted rivers flow slowly with few signs of life, and animals inevitably ingest plastic while in search of scraps of food.
The reason these growing informal and unmanaged waste sites exist throughout India and many other Asia-Pacific countries is due to underdeveloped or non-existent waste collection systems.
Basically, there’s a lot of trash with nowhere to go.
This is generally a result of two things:
There isn’t an incentive to collect or safely dispose of waste. Local and regional governments as well as the private sector — in every country — tend to “do the right thing” only when financial incentives are available.
Without a large-scale incentive, cities resort to supporting the informal waste systems that emerge organically.
Compounding this problem: India is one of the leading recipients of “waste exporting” — the practice of more developed economies exporting a portion of their plastic and other waste abroad. As Americans consume up to ten times more plastic than the average individual in India, a non-trivial amount of India’s waste problem can be attributed to consumption in the U.S.
This vacuum of mismanagement combined with the weight of dealing with other countries’ waste has resulted in India’s current system that relies on waste-pickers: typically members of the lowest socioeconomic rungs of society who sort through mountains of trash to find plastic waste that can be recycled for nominal amounts of income.
With 80% of the total recyclable waste in India being collected by low-income waste-pickers, local governments have avoided investing more to manage the issue. And the pickers who are left to do the job are largely invisible to the rest of society given their low economic standing.
It’s easy for American consumers to conceptualize plastic waste primarily as an environmental issue (and of course it is a huge environmental issue).
“But it’s equally important that we recognize plastic as a social and humanitarian crisis.”
Waste-pickers typically come from oppressed groups (often referred to as “untouchables'' by their communities). Given the historical complexities of caste, class, gender, and religion in India, the pickers are often segregated from society and prevented from upward mobility. The working conditions are notoriously unsafe and workers almost invariably lack access to good healthcare and education.
As we toured through some of the largest “plastic hotspots” in Chennai, I heard tragic stories of child waste-pickers who had been buried by trash or severely burned. It was difficult not to let myself retreat to a dark place when confronted with the human cost of daily plastic consumption. It became impossible to justify my own status quo for wasteful consumption when accounting for the full cost to nature and fellow humans. The next week I would travel 8,000 miles back to my home in San Francisco, strolling the tree-lined streets past neighbors who have little or no concept of the crisis our planet and its people face as a result of our plastic habits.
The truth is, my industry — the CPG industry — is ultimately at the root of this problem. And as primary stakeholders and contributors to the global plastic crisis, brands can also be incredibly impactful agents for change.
The CPG industry for decades has been built on a single-use plastic consumption model that prioritized convenience and profits over sustainability. Brands are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibility to a broader set of stakeholders, including the earth, and are responding to consumers who are increasingly expressing demand for sustainable and ethically-derived products. But are they going far enough? Do they address the impacts of plastic packaging that’s often littered and mismanaged at the end of its life? Likely not.
Solving a socioeconomic crisis caused by plastic is full of imperfect solutions, but our industry can push two critical solutions forward: first, reduce the use of plastics wherever possible through product redesign; and second, support systemic change in the informal waste sector through plastic credits.
To reduce plastic waste, our industry needs to reimagine how everyday essentials can exist without single-use plastic. We cannot transition out of single-use plastic into other single-use materials that also end up as polluted waste. We need to prioritize a more circular system of material reduction, reuse, and refill, where there is less opportunity for products to end up as plastic pollution and in the hands of the informal waste sector.
Second, brands can serve as financial catalysts by purchasing plastic credits that help create critical waste infrastructure. A plastic credit represents a measurable and verifiable quantity of plastic (e.g. one kilogram) that has been collected from the environment and recycled through a more formalized process than what occurs in the informal sector. Plastic credits can support systemic change in the informal waste sector by establishing waste collection infrastructure systems that allow workers to collect plastic in healthier settings with better working conditions.
Organizations, such as rePurpose Global, issue plastic credits to brands in order to create safe and empowering job opportunities in a more formalized waste collection infrastructure. Credits have the potential to dignify the work of those who bear the burden of collecting plastic waste. This safeguards against the detrimental conditions marginalized workers currently face, and creates value and dignity to the waste sector.
Plastic credits cannot serve as a license to continue polluting for brands. They must exist alongside diligent efforts to reduce our plastic footprints through product redesign.
The mountains of plastic I saw on my travels felt impossible to move. Plastic action feels paralyzing to brands when solutions don’t readily exist. Progress is always an imperfect path, but we — as brands and consumers — can inject a renewed sense of optimism into our approach to plastic pollution and create a better standard for generations to come.
