Evaluating the Effectiveness of Plastic EPR Systems in Reducing Mismanaged Plastic Waste and Aquatic Pollution

Author

Chinmaya Bhat

Abstract

 The environmental purpose of Extended Producer Responsibility extends beyond administrative compliance: plastic that escapes the managed waste system enters terrestrial and aquatic environments regardless of whether producer obligations have been discharged. This study tests whether the reporting architecture supporting EPR in India is capable of detecting that escape. Using State-level data from the Central Pollution Control Board's 2021-22 implementation report, mismanaged plastic is computed as the difference between reported generation and reported collection for the eight jurisdictions that report both quantities. The uncollected fraction ranges from 0.00 to 90.56 per cent, with a median of 6.47 per cent and a subtotal of 12.19 per cent once a jurisdiction with an internally contradictory entry is excluded. Four of the eight jurisdictions report collection exactly equal to generation, implying zero mismanaged plastic, which is not a plausible physical outcome and indicates that collection is being recorded as an estimate derived from generation rather than measured independently. Downstream mass balances close for one State, fail by 2.34 per cent for a second, and in a third the reported landfill quantity alone exceeds the State's own reported generation by a factor of 1.19. An EPR Leakage Avoidance Index is specified and reported in bounded form, giving an upper bound of 0.8781 for the subtotal, because no source in the examined corpus supplies the aquatic leakage fraction required to close it. The study concludes that the Indian EPR reporting instrument cannot presently distinguish complete collection from unmeasured collection, and therefore cannot evidence leakage prevention, irrespective of how fully producer obligations are discharged.

Keywords

Extended Producer Responsibility; mismanaged plastic waste; plastic leakage; aquatic pollution; material flow analysis; India

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References

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