To achieve Zero Waste, India needs a viable recycling market

Achieving zero municipal solid waste involves collaboration of all actors of value chain: regulation, publicity, education, engineering and landfills. But beyond getting alignment in the complex chain, there is one another critical factor that is the primary obstacle to achieving zero waste goals, and is often missing from discourse. This is insufficient capacity of recycling facilities and lack of a viable market for the recycled materials.

It is critical to understand that recycling is not sustainable, no matter how efficient and complete the process of waste collection and separation, if there is no or insufficient market for recycled materials.

Recently, this became evident as there was historic drop in oil prices making recycled PET more expensive than virgin. Since petrochemicals are important feedstocks for plastic production, virgin plastics pricing tends to follow oil and natural gas. And, as a substitute, recycled plastic pricing follows virgin plastic trends. With virgin prices becoming lower than recycled plastic prices, continuing with recycled plastic requires companies to pay a premium for their sustainability choice.

This also illustrates a need to develop a diversified product and customer base for recycled materials for sustainability of the circular economy. This can be achieved by bringing more innovation in recycling, creating large-scale processing which provides economics of scale, and expanding the local and international market for such products.

After all, recyclers need to make money too to stay in business. Any greenfield or brownfield processing plant requires investment, and investors naturally require a return on their investment.

Unless this is addressed, achieving Zero Waste will continue to remain a burden.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.