“The future of plastic is very bright. Today if you look at India, we are consuming about 26,000 tonnes of plastics everyday. And the way the growth has been projected, this will double within a decade,” Ashok Chaturvedi, chairman and managing director of Uflex, said at the 8th Speciality Films & Flexible Packaging Global Summit 2019 held in Mumbai on 22-23 August.

Chaturvedi asserted that flexible packaging, be it mono-layer or multi-layer, is 100% recyclable, reprocessable and reusable. “We can make more than 10,000 articles by recycling plastic. At Uflex, whatever flexible packaging waste we generate, we recycle and reprocess that, and make plastic products such as road divider etc. We have been recycling our plastic waste for more than two decades now. We produce 4-5 items from recycled plastics,” said Chaturvedi.“I can firmly say that the time is not far away when people will start using articles made of waste plastics with pride – like greetings cards made of recycled paper. Today, recycled paper greetings cards are fetching higher price than the greetings cards made of virgin paper. People will start taking pride in using items made out of recycled plastic too.”

“Today there are solutions already available for recycling all kinds of plastic – we don’t have to find it anywhere now. All we need is a proper waste collection system in place and to understand the benefits of recycling. It is sad that even developed countries, let alone developing countries, have not given enough focus to recycling,” said Chaturvedi. He cited his recent visit to Poland where he saw that municipal authorities had not been recycling and reusing plastic waste and that the waste was being used to generate energy in cement plants. Similarly, he said that in China, plastic waste is being burnt, which is harmful to the environment.