The Environment Ministry has introduced rules that make it harder for makers of disposable plastic ware to label such products as ’biodegradable’, introducing a stipulation that they must not leave any microplastics behind.
Biodegradable plastic and compostable plastic are projected as the two broad kinds of technological fixes to India’s burgeoning problem of plastic waste pollution.
Biodegradable plastic involves plastic goods being treated before they are sold. When discarded, the material is expected to decompose naturally over time though there are no tests yet to determine if such plastics completely degrade. Compostable plastics, on the other hand, do degrade, but require industrial or large municipal waste management facilities to do so.
No microplastics
A new set of amendments to India’s Plastic Waste Management (Amendment) Rules, 2024, made public last week, defines biodegradable plastics as not only capable of “...degradation by biological processes in specific environment such as soil, landfill...” but also as materials that do not leave “any microplastics...”
The caveat about microplastics in the updated rules does not specify which chemical tests can be used to establish the absence of microplastics, or to what extent microplastics must be reduced in a sample in order to consider them eliminated, says Sunil Panwar, CEO, Symphony Environmental India. The company offers technologies that, when added to regular single-use plastics, makes them biodegradable.
“There are multiple sources of microplastics in the environment and it can come through water, soil, composting medium. The current standards [in India] only recommend tests that can be done to determine the levels of microplastics but don’t prescribe a definitive test... Should a standard for microplastics be eventually determined, it should, for fairness sake, include both compostable and biodegradable plastics,” he told The Hindu.
Single-use plastic ban
Microplastics are defined as any solid plastic particle insoluble in water, with dimensions between 1 µm and 1,000 µm (1 µm is one-thousandth of a millimetre). In recent years, they have been reported as a major source of pollution affecting rivers and oceans.
Biodegradable plastics have received extra attention, as The Hindu reported in March 2023, after the Union government banned single-use plastic in 2022, and recommended, among other things, the adoption of biodegradable plastic. However, the question of what exactly constituted biodegradable plastic was unanswered.
Several firms, including some which used technology such as Symphony’s, were left in the lurch as the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) refused to provide them with a ‘provisional certificate’ to licence their products as biodegradable. This is because the CPCB only considers as biodegradable a plastic sample that has 90% degraded, and such a process takes at least two years. Manufacturers who showed that their samples had degraded, say 5% in 45 days, were refused a ‘provisional certificate.’ This was because the rules do not specify exactly what degree of degradation would merit such a certificate.
