Middlemen Have been a staple in many business in India and abroad. There was a time when you could not do without them, but that time is long gone, yet here in India we allow them to function as individuals/companies or NGO’s insuring that true financial value is not delivered to people or companies actually doing the work.
Brands trying to implement EPR in india have the opportunity to save massive amounts of money while making real environmental & social impact by dealing directly with companies that collect, segregate & aggregate & process plastic waste & by doing away with NGO’s and others acting as traders keeping majority of the revenues for them selves, while cheating individuals and companies that are actually doing the real work at a ground level.
Middle men and organisations acting like middle men have been successfully profiteering at the cost of consumers/companies/governments and the under privileged while providing little accountability in the process.
To understand EPR better, kindly read and refer to plastic waste management rules 2016. Note that you do not need to register yourself as a PRO (Producer Responsibility Organisation). As an aggregator, you need to insure that you are measuring & monitoring the plastic waste that you collect, with proof of purchase or collection documented. You need to ensure that you are dealing with registered recyclers who can provide you with a recycling certificate and where all transactions are above board with a clear paper trail in place. E.g. GST bills of sale. If your processing partner is processing the said plastic waste into granules and selling it further to be made into products, it’s imperative that the same be documented in a transparent manner also.
As a processor, you need to be registered with state pollution control board and have all requisite licences to operate in place. As a processor or aggregator you can deal directly with brands. This of course will require you to break the current syndicate in place & may require concerted efforts from your end.
Get in to Linkedin: find sustainability & legal heads of the concerned departments and start mailing them your proposition. Make sure that you provide information such as quantum of plastic collected/processed, type of plastic processed along with areas of operation.
The current process in place is corrupt to the extent where EPR certificates are being sold at ₹2.5 to ₹4.00 per kilogram. As an aggregator your cost of conduction EPR is going to be a lot higher than that for a processor. This is because, logestics along with some preprocessing, such as bailing the material so that it can be transported efficiently to the processing units (Mostly cement kilns) will add to costs.
Our internal numbers show that if EPR is to be done in a impactful manner with transference & traceability in place costing world out between ₹12-14/ per kilograms for aggregators.
From a processors perceptive, the costs associated as of now may be nil or negligible, but as the market evolves & competition increases processors will eventually have to start paying for the raw material to be delivered to their door step. These costs both for the processor and the aggregator can be off set by charging a fair price form brand owners to undertaken EPR activities.
Bio Mining, which involves the removal of legacy waste from landfills is being used by middle men to extract low grade plastic from landfills, send it to cement kilns and then claim EPR credits on it. The tax payer, through the government is already paying private contractors to recover & treat this legacy waste. True extended producer responsibly means that the waste never ends up in the landfill & such coercive methods big utilised by individuals & companies to defraud not only brands but also the government need to be checked and put an end too immediately. If anything the proceeds from the EPR through booming must be used to compensate the contractor for the work that they are doing, whereby reducing the payout from the governments end.
It is imperative that the current nexus of NGOs and crony operators be dismantled, as not only are they effectively killing competition, they are also not doing much more than just pushing paper. In places where actual work is happening, these middle men operators are keeping the chunk of the money for themselves and passing on pitons to people actually doing the hard work on a ground level, such as the unorganised sector, private collection agencies & aggregators.
The true beneficiaries of EPR, should be the environment, consumers, brands, waste collectors, aggregators, transporters & processing units. Not paper pushing corrupt NGO’s individuals and companies