NEW DELHI: Ahead of the Centre’s plan to launch a policy initiative on October 2 for curbing single-use plastic, a group of 31 major companies have decided to launch a packaging waste management venture to ensure that by 2025, no recyclable packaging material reaches the landfill.
The producer-led venture ‘Karo Sambhav - Closing Material Loops’ seeks to create an efficient value chain for collection of post-consumer packaging and to optimise material recycling processes.
Together, the participating companies converge assets and investment of around Rs 1,000 crore.
The venture plans to have a network of 125 material recovery facilities across India which will work with 2,500 aggregators over the next three years.
The project will be scaled up in phases and focus upon alignment with the Swachh Bharat Mission and a zero-waste movement, and enable utilisation of secondary materials post recycling.
“The focus of this venture will be on developing an India-wide ecosystem for plastic waste management by creating win-win partnerships with stakeholders, and applying technology to bring transparency, traceability and scale,” said Pranshu Singhal, who is leading the set-up of this venture.
The approach to setting up a new producer-led venture was developed and incubated by Packaging Association for Clean Environment (PACE) for over a year with the objective of developing a transformative system which enables inclusion, ethics, transparency, good governance and traceability of waste.
“This unique venture will focus on closing the material loops for multiple types of packaging materials and shall bring together 60 per cent of the plastics value chain in India. It will bring convergence to multiple solutions being put by producers individually,” said Vimal Kedia, president, PACE.