Circular economy for plastic

Progress in handling waste has been uninspiring

The new Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2022, are marked by the innovative concepts they moot to incentivise compliance of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) for the collection, recycling and safe disposal of discarded plastic material. These norms, significantly, seek to create a market for the sale, purchase and sharing of EPR compliance certificates on the lines of the carbon trading mechanism for mitigating climate change. Simultaneously, provisions have been made, quite appropriately, to penalise lapses in fulfilling the EPR requirements. The underlying objective seems to be to evolve a circular economy in the plastics sector by encouraging recycling, sharing, leasing,