Eco India: Why is India struggling to get rid of its thermocol waste

foreign [Music] sifts through the trash collected today by Jamila a waste picker in the Seema Puri colony of East Delhi you'll find thermocol waste in the mix a material she specifically avoided even five years ago [Music] it made Financial sense to collect thermocol waste for Waste Pickers like Jamila when in 2014 a thermocol recycling Factory came up eight kilometers away from her locality the first authorized plant in Delhi NCR and among the first in the country [Applause] [Music] foreign is a type of plastic that is widely used as protective packaging for electronics and fragile items because in India you avoid collecting it because it is lightweight and high in volume fetching a lower price per kilogram it also takes up a lot of space for storage and transportation the result thermocol getting dumped in landfills or causing marine pollution or clogging drains and causing flooding it is also often burnt releasing toxic styrene and Benzene Vapors [Music] in an attempt to close this Gap sanyam Jain started Thermo Waste Solutions in 2014. by establishing a network of 50 waste Pickers across a 22 kilometer stretch of ghaziabad and East Delhi Thermo Waste Solutions is among a handful of thermocol recycling plants in the country that is bringing in a system to recycle this waste we are working with around 50 or more rack Pickers and our network is spread between yamuna River and Indian River so you know a big network is working it's a entirely informal network but a very efficient one so they collect thermocol on daily basis creating a network of waste Pickers incentivized for thermocol collection has also helped Jen collaborate with manufacturing and packaging companies companies that are mandated under extended producer responsibility or epr to scientifically dispose off the thermocol they've used so thermocol is also a plastic only so there are two types of plastic thermoset and thermoplast plastic it's also a thermoplast only and it's a plastic it comes under the epr guidelines which is extended producer responsibility so according to That All Brand owners and manufacturers who are using thermocol as a packaging it is their duty to facilitate in the recycling of the plastic that they are using in the manufacturing so it is also covered under that we are working with Brands who are using thermocol as their packaging and we are collecting it we are recycling it and giving them the credits and in return they are helping us in branding they are helping us financially also to make sure that more and more thermocol is recycled [Applause] thermal Waste Solutions has so far recycled 1 lakh 80 000 kilos of thermocol waste which when stacked together they say is equivalent to a pile that is 4 lakh eleven thousand meters high about 45 times the height of Mount Everest and then from this it comes to this Hopper and here's the shredded summer fall go through a mechanical recycling process so in this there's a barrel there's a screw going on and electric heaters are there it comes out in the melted form and from there it goes into another Barrel having another layer of crew and a heating system then it then that melted material goes through a filter which converted into uh wires the wires of plastic these wires are finally turned into polystyrene granules that are used along with Virgin plastic to make photo frames and bangles to an analysis carried out by the company this stockpile of recycled thermocol is still minuscule compared to the recycling potential that exists indicative of a poor collection system and dismal awareness of its recyclable properties in the consumer Market One Challenge is misconception which leads to not uh segregation the segregation is being not done people are just dumping it because they feel any weight is not going to recycle because the Layman believe that thermocol is not recyclable at all generates roughly 1 million tons of thermocol waste every year of this barely two percent gets recycled even with a recent ban on single-use plastic that includes only specific thermocol items like Cutlery the need to bring down consumption is vital [Music] the product is completely biodegradable 30 year old is a mechanical engineer in Delhi [Music] Solutions has developed a packaging alternative to thermocon made from crops double waste and mushrooms the product is chemical free and hundred percent biodegradable what we are doing here is that you know we've fine-tuned a mushroom strain we've trained it to eat a certain source of carbon as its raw material carbon as its food and the beauty about mushrooms is that they are the only organisms that can break down the lignin component now lignin is what makes the biodegradability of this material tough or long so Paddy strawberries by itself would take a very long time to degrade in soil but this mushroom can degrade this lignin very fast and while doing so it gives it enough strength and rigidity yeah the first step crop stubble is shredded and put in a mixer [Music] [Applause] we add a sports of the mushroom that we have created these are billions and billions of spores of them of the mushroom strain each four would then finally germinate into a mycelium of its own armpit's Innovation is trying to kill two birds with one stone if the market an alternative to thermocol and also help mitigate stubble burning through the process of biofabrication the technique of growing a product from living cells the mixture of mushrooms and crop residue gets transformed into moles to be baked and made ready to use this is the place where this mushroom covers this entire bag and grows this is the nature at its finest where all these bags are ready to be used to be transferred into molds thank you yes this mycelium packaging is supposed to fare better than conventional thermocort when it comes to cushioning and strength it is also moisture and Flame proof but the price point may vary from 10 to 30 percent higher or 10 to 30 percent lower than conventional thermocol depending on client specification foreign [Music] sells natural condiments like sauces dips and preserves that need to be stored in glass jars which are often at risk of breakage while handling [Music] explains how switching to mycelium moles though expensive has helped to compensate for breakage losses we shifted to the raksha's ecological packaging and that has kind of given us the protection that we need along with being sustainable and it's working for us and our damages are very very low less than half a percent like even probably 9.2 or 0.3 percent luckily of course cost is a major factor for any business and thankfully you know we've been able to get it at a very very comparative prize the reason also that we shifted was because we do get customers who complain about the amount of thermocol that we use or if you're using a lot of bubble wrap right now uh thermocol of course they also find you know it's a problem how to dispose some call but now with this one because it's ecological it's a steamer and you can just put it in your soil so it becomes easier for them to get rid of it as well [Music] Solutions claims to have prevented about 20 000 square feet of thermocol waste from going into the landfill and 250 Acres of Farmland from burning stable although the slow process of growing mycelium continues to be a big challenge arpit has his work cut out for him currently we've made this production unit and we are consuming approximately 10 tons of cropsible waste a month but we've taken this newer space which would help us increase the production capacity by over 10 times so taking our overall production capacity to 100 to 150 tons a month Solutions is currently testing their mycelium product for marine degradability thermocol recyclers tell us how it is going to take a long time and public will to sustainably tackle thermocol waste one thing that we've been you know talking a lot about is that we need a concession on the indirect tax or at least you know there should be a difference between the GST being levied on Virgin plastic and on recycled plastic there is a need of Education people need to be sensitized about thermocol they need to understand that if segregated it can be recycled so if more and more municipalities work on that more and more companies which are using thermocol as packaging they need to educate their customers that how to dispose it off how they can find a recycler in the vicinity and send it to them [Music] thanks for watching Eco India if you like the story please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to scroll dot in on YouTube [Music]

Channel: Scroll.in

Views: 19,959

Keywords: thermocol, thermocol waste, waste management, sustainability, save the planet, climate crisis

Id: tm4s56SDRVw

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023