EPR Portal insights A Deep Dive into India's Centralized Portal for Plastic Packaging

October 29, 2024

The concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) found a mention for the first time in the Indian plastic policy ecosystem in the Plastic Waste Management Rules of 2016.1 But this solitary mention did not mandate that Producers, Importers and Brand Owners (PIBOs) — should collect back or recycle plastic waste; neither did it assign any targets for collection or recycling.

The then EPR system in the country, thus, was voluntary. The amount of plastic waste collected, handled and recycled was mainly based on how much the implementing PIBOs wanted to invest in the plastic waste management system. PIBOs could be observed running campaigns and programmes for improved plastic waste management in geographies of their preference. Most of the EPR programmes were undertaken by Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs), which were third-party agencies that helped the PIBOs collect back, channelise, and recycle plastic waste.

In June 2020, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) introduced the Union Framework for Extended Producers Responsibility (under the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016).2 This Framework was based on a set of guiding principles (see Box: Guiding principles of the Union Framework for EPR).

The Framework also informed that the MoEFCC had constituted a committee to develop a new EPR framework for managing plastic waste. The committee started its work in November 2017, meeting twice in 2017, twice in 2018, and once in 2019. The members of the committee were also taken on an exposure visit to the city of Indore in Madhya Pradesh, which had been managing its dry waste in a relatively better manner than its counterparts.