Plastic Recycling
India’s first plastic waste reduction program that aims to create awareness in the community, increase plastic waste collection and promote plastic recycling.
The program promotes collection and recycling of plastic waste in communities and creates awareness to reduce plastic waste. The project mobilizes and incentivizes informal waste pickers or ‘Kabadiwala’ (as popularly known in the country) to collect and recover plastic waste from households, landfills, water bodies, and industries. Further, it educates and trains waste pickers to segregate plastic into different polymers (e.g., mainly PE, PP, and PET) through affordable and scalable methods based on size, gravity in water flow method, and magnetization.
Further, through this project SMG facilitates and encourages waste collectors to recycle and granulate plastic waste through recycling agents. SMG incentivises these frontline waste collectors and recycling agents to make respective operations financially sustainable, and raises awareness on plastic waste management, collection, and recycling activities by organizing campaigns (both digital and in-person) and volunteering activities. This program has a domino effect in the societies as it helps in cleanliness and employment generation.
Incentives create new jobs and incentivizes existing waste pickers and recycling agents to enhance capacities and use effective wasys and technologies to collect, sort, and recycle waste that would otherwise be not possible due to extremely low margins and profitability of the job.
Each individual who joins this project as a waste collector receives a premium of INR 2 (or USD 0.025) per kg to collect plastic waste, and an incentive of INR 4 (or USD 0.05) to either same individual or to a local collector who could sort and segregate plastic waste using methodologies proposed by SMG.
Moreover, an additional incentive of INR 2 (USD 0.025) per kg will be given to recycling agent to recycle and granulate plastic waste using affordable and scalable ways. These incentives are in addition to the earnings of the stakeholders, if any, and will support basic operations such as that of logistics, electricity, making the previously unprofitable collection, recovery, and recycling operations now viable.
In the later phase, SMG plans to monitor the non-recyclable waste generated by the local collectors, otherwise discarded, or burnt to properly dump.
Power in Numbers
1,000
Tonnes of plastic recycled
280,000
Lives positively impacted
1,200
Volunteers