The ministry is likely to come up with stringent EPR guidelines defining indicative costs, timelines and collection targets.
NEW DELHI: Corporate heavyweights like HUL, Nestle, P&G, Samsung, LG as well as big F&B businesses may soon face a strict plastic usage regime. The government plans being considered include asking all plastic waste generating companies to set aside funds to incentivise consumers to return used plastic, levying an advance disposal fee on companies that’s proportional to quantum of plastic waste they generate, ensuring stringent monitoring of companies’ compliance, and heavy fines for non-compliance.
Officials familiar with the matter, who spoke off record, said this will be part of a broader plan to operationalise extended producer responsibility (EPR) under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
EPR is defined in the 2001 OECD Guidance as an environmental policy approach in which a producer’s responsibility for a product is extended to the post-consumer stage of a product’s life cycle.
“Stricter enforcement of EPR norms and heavy rates of penalty on firms that do not comply may be the way forward,” one official said, adding “financial resources collected from fines can be used for providing access to recycling technologies for the informal sector”.
The ministry is likely to come up with stringent EPR guidelines defining indicative costs, timelines and collection targets. Section 9 of the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016 mandates all plastic manufacturers and brand owners to work on modalities for waste collection systems based on EPR. But those requirements had been mostly ignored as there were no guidelines.
