Plastics – a boon and a bane:

Plastics is wonder material. Enhancing the life of product, light weight & economical, plastics packaging
has grown exponentially around the world and in India too. India has lower plastics consumption at 11Kg,
4times lower than world average. Yet we find littered plastics everywhere in India. Citizen apathy to waste
segregation, broken collection and treatment to waste, no circular economy could be the reasons why
plastics in on land, in ocean and now entering food chain. It’s becoming a climate crisis.

Plastics - a wasted but recyclable resource – for the bottom of the pyramid

Plastics generates 60% of daily earnings to the wastpickers in Delhi. These urban poor scavenge landfills
and streets to pick and bring back plastics to circular economy via informal collection and recycling. These
migrant labors however work under extreme conditions , contacting with hazardous material and gases
reducing their lifespan by >10 years than all of us.

Program for generating Sustainable Livelihood

We could create a livelihood program with help of Plastics. Pro India can create the a network of self-
sustaining collection which benefits not just the waste pickers but get the litter in Delhi removed

1. Pro India could help build collection system network for such packaging – like tetrapack/ MLP
2. Collected packaging could be sorted and recyclables could be routed to recyclers
3. Non-Recyclables could be organized to go to Waste to Energy or even Pyrolysis plants
4. Operations could be managed by Waste Pickers in SHG – trained by Pro India
5. Operations would yield EPR benefits which can be passed back to the Waste Pickers