ANNOUNCEMENTS
India generates 9.3 million metric tons plastic waste every year, a mammoth of plastic waste ends up in the environment, our water bodies and landfills. The current infrastructure doesn’t support the management of tons of plastic waste generated every day. It is difficult to scale up waste collection and recycling to the levels required to lower the usage of virgin material and prevent sizable amounts of plastic from entering the environment, particularly the world's oceans, without additional incentives.
Where countries are a putting pressure on the polluters with mechanisms like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), it is not enough. India also has an EPR mechanism under the Plastic Waste Management Rules. But the widespread non-compliance of and absence of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in various geographies has led to the introduction of a voluntary market mechanism; PLASTIC CREDITS which incentivises the collection and recycling of plastic waste.
Plastic pollution is a global problem, plastic credits act as catalyst to increase the collection and recycling activity from hard-to-reach islands and various eco-sensitive zones along with urban and rural areas. My project involves development of a plastic credits project in the Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR), India. Phase 1 involved preliminary research and data gathering post which Phase 2 involved scouting for ground implementation partners working on plastic waste management in the selected geography. After analysing multiple partners on different parameters including scale of operations, hold over value chain, labour practices, use of end product etc; ReNew has narrowed down on one partner for a pilot project which will further scale up. Phase 3 is the due diligence process for both ReNew and the implementation partner which is in progress. Post this the project will be executed.
This project will be listed under Verra and contribute to increasing the management of plastic waste in Delhi NCR.
Key Words: Plastic Credits, Waste Management, Credit financing, Carbon Market, Extended Producer Responsibility.
