All plastic packaging to be recycled: Govt

A new rule drafted by the environment ministry will make it mandatory for food and beverage makers to collect used plastic bags and bottles. Manufacturers will have to set up collection mechanisms across the country.

Updated on: Aug 15, 2010, 24:46:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Delhi

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A new rule drafted by the environment ministry will make it mandatory for food and beverage makers to collect used plastic bags and bottles. Manufacturers will have to set up collection mechanisms across the country.

“Even gutka sachets will be covered,” a member of the committee for framing new rules to regulate plastics in India said. “Rules will be comprehensive to cover multi-layered plastic used for chips packets, plastic beverage bottles, biscuit wrappers and anything else in plastic.”

This is in lieu of not imposing a complete ban on use of plastic for packaging consumer goods. The ministry is not in favour of such a ban.

The manufacturers with the help of municipal bodies can either set up plastic collection centres across cities or give financial incentives to retailers to collect end of the life plastic waste. “The plastic waste can be used for manufacturing stronger board and roads,” said an official of the Indian Institution of Packaging.

A senior ministry official said the idea of the new rules is to discourage large-scale use of plastic, rather than a ban, and impose financial disincentives for the same.

The new rules will also stipulate the responsibility of plastic manufacturers, local municipal bodies and state pollution control boards in controlling the environmental menace of plastics, which cause for sewer choking and animal deaths.

“It will take two to three years to put the entire mechanism in place,” the official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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