on Indian streets—bottles are the highest value
recyclables. Plastic waste makes up roughly half
of waste pickers’ earnings, and bottles made of
polyethylene terephthalate (PET) account for
about half of the plastics collected, Bharati
Chaturvedi, director of Chintan, a nonprofit that
supports waste pickers, told me.
The informal sector is largely responsible for
India’s high recycling rate, estimated at 60 per-
cent. (In contrast, the U.S. recycles less than 30
percent of its trash overall and just 9 percent of
plastic.) But there’s no money in nonrecyclables,
and so bags, food wrappers, sachets, and so on
don’t get picked up. Instead they litter Indian
streets and wash into the Ganges.
Last October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
launched phase two of his “Clean India” cam-
paign. In the first phase, the country had installed
nearly 90 million toilets in a bid to end open defe-
cation, which remains common in India. One goal
of the second phase is to make cities garbage free.
Modi’s government is building waste-to-energy
plants—that is, incinerators that generate electric-
ity. It also has announced a wide-ranging national
ban on the manufacture and use of single-use
plastics. Scheduled to take effect in July, the ban
will cover thin shopping bags, foam containers,
cutlery, cups, plates, straws, candy and ice-cream
sticks, certain films, and other disposable plastics.
In India, however, the gap between ambitious
national legislation and its enforcement at the
local and state levels is sometimes large. Existing
federal waste regulations are “absolutely marvel-
ous, everything you could ever want,” said Robin
Jeffrey, co-author with Assa Doron of Waste of
a Nation, a study of India’s garbage. “Except
nobody in the country could come within a
bull’s roar of achieving them.” India has been
trying for more than 35 years to limit discharges
of sewage and factory waste into the Ganges—so
far with little success.
The pandemic slowed government action on
projects to clean India. It also led to a surge in
plastic waste here, as it did globally, as people
in lockdown ordered more take-out food and
home deliveries.
“Post-pandemic, civil society has a better
appreciation for plastic and its role in saving
humankind,” said Deepak Ballani, director gen-
eral of the All India Plastics Manufacturers’ Asso-
ciation. “At the same time, the awareness about
environmental impact resulting from littering has
increased severalfold.” Like the plastics industry
elsewhere, Ballani’s group favors recycling and
opposes bans, arguing that they cost jobs and that
the problem is not single-use plastics themselves
but the way people dispose of them.
Since 2016 the Indian government has been
working on new regulations that would require
producers of plastic packaging to take respon-
sibility for the cost of collecting and recycling
their disposable products. Similar regulations,
known as extended producer responsibility, or
EPR, have helped curb plastic waste in the Euro-
pean Union since the mid-1990s. In the U.S., the
plastics industry has opposed national legisla-
tion. Only Maine and Oregon have passed laws
requiring EPR for plastic packaging.
Meanwhile, the amount of plastic waste flowing
into the ocean keeps increasing. The forecast that
it will almost triple by 2040 under a business-as-
usual scenario comes from a report drafted by
Pew Charitable Trusts and Systemiq, a London-
based environmental and investment company.
All the localized bag bans, bottle bills, and recy-
cling commitments you hear about would at best
shave a few percent off business as usual, the
report concludes; solving the plastic waste prob-
lem will require all of the above. But it also will
require governments to fundamentally realign
the plastics industry’s economic incentives. In
particular, if we don’t want plastic waste in the
ocean to double or triple, we have to keep plas-
tic production from doubling on land—which is
what the industry is projected to do if it’s allowed
to do business as usual.
Pew and Systemiq are hardly the only voices
prescribing such an approach. In December
2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engi-
neering, and Medicine recommended the U.S.
develop a national strategy to reduce plastic
waste, one that could include a cap on virgin
plastic production. Such a cap would help
address the climate crisis as well; the plastics
industry accounts for about 6 percent of global
oil consumption. The two crises are linked.
And the suggestion that the solution to both
requires leaving oil in the ground, which once
was considered radical, has become part of the
mainstream conversation.
In India too, the calls for action have become
more urgent and widespread. Brajesh Kumar
Dubey, an environmental engineering professor at
the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, told
me he was surprised, as he traveled the Ganges
Basin on the National Geographic expedition, to108 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC