India’s Plastic Ban: A triumph for the fossil fuel industry? By Swathi Seshadri and Ashi Datta | July 26, 2022 https://www.cenfa.org/indias-plastic-ban-a-triumph-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry/ Analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities, which has released a report on the ban, claims that the current ban will not affect FMCGs, but one on sachets/pouches/wrappers/laminated tubes could impact their profitability. ..The 2021 Rules treat SUPs generated by FMCG and non-FMCGs differentially (except for the straws attached to packaged branded beverages). While there is a ban on non-FMCG SUPs, companies in the FMCG category have been allowed to go scot-free since accountability measures like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are only introduced in diluted forms allowing for use of these toxic materials by paying a small fee and staggering transition over 3 years.
According to a PlastIndia (2019) report, Reliance Industries Limited is the sole producer of LDPE (a variety of plastic raw materials used in SUPs) and owns 42% of the total production capacity of commodity plastics, used to manufacture SUPs with OPaL in a distant second place.
A February 2022 CPCB notification identifies 18 polymer producers who supply raw materials for SUPs, which is a niche industry. Since the ban is limited to only some SUPs, this will not have a significant damaging effect on these producers since they will continue producing polymers for other SUPs which have not been banned.
Banning SUPs used by big corporations would mean upsetting billion-dollar industries, a move that the Indian government has not even remotely considered yet. If the government indeed wants to put money where its mouth is, it would focus on envisioning a retail system which will take us away from the use-and-throw economy to one which is designed for reusable and sustainable packaging and which considers the interests of not big corporations but smaller players, the end user and fundamentally, the environment and climate.
