Ministry of Environment tightens rules on bioplastics
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. Compostable plastics, on the other hand, do degrade but require industrial or large municipal waste management facilities to do so.
A new set of amendments to India’s Plastic Waste Management (Amendment) Rules, 2024, made public last week, defines biodegradable plas
Microplastics are reported as a major source of pollution.
tics 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 singleuse plastics, make them biodegradable.
“... 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.
Microplastics have been reported as a major source of pollution affecting rivers and oceans.
Several firms were left in the lurch as the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) refused to provide them with a ‘provisional certificate’ to license their products as biodegradable. This is because the CPCB only considers biodegradable a plastic sample that has 90% degraded, and such a process takes at least two years.