Indian Beauty & Hygiene Association’s Sustainable Plastic Waste Management Initiative gets Encouraging Response

Today on the 45th World Environment Day, the Indian Beauty & Hygiene Association (IBHA) has reported successful implementation of its plastic waste management project in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai. The project was launched in 2014, under a task force of IBHA members – L'Oréal, Godrej, HUL, Nivea, Dabur, Himalaya, ITC, J&J, P&G, Wipro, Marico, Colgate, Hygiene Research Institute, and is now looking at expanding this project to other cities.

The 'zero-waste' plastic management project focuses on collecting, segregating and recycling post-consumer use multi-layered plastics (MLP), which are considered to be difficult to collect and recycle. Multi-layered plastics are most commonly found in the packaging of food packets, shampoo sachets, among others. Under this initiative, the project has successfully collected and recycled around 55 tonnes of MLPs in these cities.

On the progress, Mr Dinesh Dayal, President, IBHA, said, "While several steps have been taken over the years to recycle post-consumer solid plastic waste, what slipped through the cracks was MLPs. We are delighted that the project has proven beyond doubt that it is feasible to recycle MLPs, which usually gets dumped in landfills. Having implemented the project in different cities, we can say that the model can be easily adopted across the country. The project is also an important commitment from the beauty and hygiene industry towards the Swachh Bharat Mission of the Government of India."

The collection of MLP is a major issue in India due to a lack of proper segregation mechanism at the household level. Even ragpickers, a critical constituent of recycling, were uninterested to collect as it offered limited value, compared to hard plastics and required more physical efforts for collection and segregation. To address this primary problem around collection at source, IBHA pioneered this model 2013, much before the Plastic Waste Management Rules of India were published in 2016, by partnering with leading NGOs and recyclers, while developing a strong financial support model that incentivized rag-pickers for collecting MLPs.

In the period of six years, the waste management model has established a feasible way to reduce landfills and simultaneously generating steady financial security for the rag-pickers. IBHA also works with recyclers who collect MLP for energy recovery, including ploy fuel oil (used in gensets), material for road construction and even as fuel in cement factories.