Plastic & solid waste

Story hook

On the morning of 2 September 2017, Mukesh Sharma, a 50-year-old ragpicker, was finishing his shift at the Ghazipur landfill in east Delhi — a man-made mountain of garbage that had risen 65 metres above the floodplain of the Yamuna, towering higher than the Qutub Minar at 72.5 m. Mukesh did not know this. He was scavenging plastic bottles + scrap metal when, without warning, the eastern slope collapsed. Tonnes of decomposing trash, leaking methane gas, and the bodies of three workers slid down onto a passing motorcycle on the NH-24 below. Two people died.

Ghazipur is one of 3,160 active landfills in India. Bandhwari (Gurugram-Faridabad), Deonar (Mumbai), Kodungaiyur (Chennai), Mandur (Bengaluru) — the list is long. India generates 400 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year (CPCB 2023), of which only 37% is processed + treated. The rest piles up. 3.5 million tonnes of plastic waste alone — 35% of which is single-use packaging that the Single-Use Plastic ban of 1 July 2022 was supposed to eliminate.

Two years on, the SUP ban has had patchy results: municipal corporations have seized 50,000+ tonnes of banned items, 5,000+ FIRs filed, but plastic carry bags continue to flow at temple festivals, weddings, roadside food stalls. Meanwhile, the 2022 Extended Producer Responsibility amendment to the Plastic Waste Management Rules mandated that producers + importers + brand owners (PIBOs) of plastic packaging — Hindustan Unilever, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ITC, Britannia, Nestlé, Patanjali, Amazon, Flipkart — must collect + recycle a percentage of plastic equivalent to what they put in the market.

For UPSC, plastic + solid waste is the most contemporary GS-III topic — pollution that we can see, smell, and increasingly inhale through microplastics. It ties together environmental governance, international treaties (Stockholm, Basel, Plastic Treaty 2024), and the circular economy.

Why this matters for UPSC

Plastic + Solid Waste are regular Prelims topics (asked 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022). Multiple Mains questions on EPR + circular economy + SWM Rules (2017, 2019, 2023). Tests rules (SWM 2016, PWM 2016 + 2022, EPR), bans (SUP 1 July 2022), bodies (CPCB, ULBs, SPCBs), specific items (PET, polystyrene, microbeads), and waste hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle).