The story of India’s fight against COVID-19 wouldn’t be complete without a parallel narrative on how the country is waging another war — and probably losing it — against single-use plastic. Despite conscious campaigning against its use over the last couple of years, the material has scripted a comeback through the increased use of products like goggles, face shields, sanitizer bottles, and other protective equipment, which are being used to arrest the spread of COVID-19.

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As demand for these products has grown, so has production. According to data sourced from the Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AIMED), before COVID-19, only 20 companies pan-India were in the business to manufacturing gloves, which totalled to 211 crore pieces per annum. Today, the number of glove manufacturers has swelled to 27, while the total number of gloves being produced is expected to grow to 245 crore in the first year itself.

Sanitizer bottles, goggles consume plastic at a rapid pace

Similarly, 49 companies are manufacturing sanitizers as opposed to the 35 that existed pre-COVID. While only 1.95 crore litres of sanitizer was produced per annum before the pandemic, data says that number will triple to 5.97 crore litres this year, alone.

While AIMED has had no recorded data on manufacture of goggles in India pre-COVID, the association records 17 players in the business since the pandemic began, with 2.8 crore goggles expected to be produced this year. These products require plastic and plenty of it — not just as raw material, but also for packaging purposes.

Takeaway restaurants are a plastic hotspot too

It isn’t just medical devices and protective gear that is making use of plastic raw material at an alarming rate. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple state government guidelines have mandated that restaurants run only takeaways and not dine-in services. Even when the Government of Tamil Nadu allowed dine-in services to reopen briefly between June 8 and 18, it advised restaurants to make use of disposable cutlery as much as possible.

These advisories and guidelines have inadvertently resulted in another spike in single-use plastic, in the F&B industry.

“There is a spike (in single-use plastic), but we try to manage and bring it within the norms set by the government,” says Shabnam Kamil, President at Jonah’s, a Chennai-based cafe-restaurant. “I'm not sure that our disposable cutlery is biodegradable,” she adds, “But we try and stick to cutlery that we buy from our vendor, which has apparently been approved by the government.”

Uncertainty surrounding biodegradability

The undeniable fact is this: there is confusion over what plastic is permitted and what is not, in the F&B industry. There is also no way of knowing for sure whether plastic being used in kitchens, to run takeaway services, is permitted or not. The restaurant business is merely the tip of the iceberg. In the food industry itself, the bigger consumers of single-use plastic are central kitchens and corporate caterers that feed thousands of employees every single day.

"Depending on the nature of the site (factory that caterers supply to), there is anywhere between a 20 and 30 percent increase in the application of single-use plastic,” says Sanjay Kumar, MD and CEO of Elior India, a central kitchen that runs catering services across several companies in the IT and manufacturing industry.

“The irony is we have no way of knowing which is a biodegradable plastic or non-biodegradable plastic,” Sanjay adds. The hope, of course, is that this spike in the use of single-use plastic will be short-lived, and people will become more plastic-conscious as the uncertainty over the pandemic recedes.

First Published:Jul 27, 2020 3:40 PM IST