Single-use plastic has been a major cause of worry across the world; so has been air quality index (AQI) that has constantly breached safe limits in urban centres over the last few years.

To make matters worse, a recent study has found a direct correlation between a rise in plastic consumption and an increase in air pollution levels.

Office goers who ordered food delivery consumed 10 g more plastic than others.

If 10 percent of India is employed workforce that stands at more than 30 crores (as per 2011 census) was to order food in office, we have to deal with an additional 300,000 kilos of single-use plastic waste!

Global consumption of single-use plastic is poised to touch 48.5 million tonnes by 2025 despite covid-19 reshaping the global economy.

In India, PET bottles are used in 70 percent pediatric and liquid geriatric formulations. It is no rocket science that most of it ends up in landfills because no one stocks these bottles forever at home.

While the potentially harmful effects of toxins and chemicals on human health are manifold, it is time we take their environmental impact into consideration.

With so much talk about recycling almost everything under the sun, medicine bottles are no exception. But can they be recycled at all?

Technically it is possible but factors like their composition and size come into play. Most recycling companies reject such bottles owing to their small size that cause problems during the process.

These bottles cannot undergo biodegradation and over time, cause a sea of trouble both for the environment and also the marine ecosystem because, in one way or the other, they find their way to aquatic life.

While the government is in the process of banning single-use plastic products, multilayered plastics used for packing FMCG products will still be around in the foreseeable future.

Though the industry missed the initial deadline to phase out multi-layered packaging material in 2018, collective efforts to address this specific waste management issue is still missing.

In the absence of suitable alternate materials for packing FMCG products, multilayered plastic continues to be commonly used in packaging most of the FMCG products including snacks, biscuits, candy, tea powder, coffee powder, edible oil, etc.

In the last five years, the Indian plastic packaging industry has grown around 20 percent CAGR and is estimated to achieve $32 billion annual turnover by 2025. Around three-fourth of this market will belong to packaging FMCG, which should be a concern not only for the government but also for us.