India’s reported plastic waste generation fell to 1.76 million tonnes in 2024 to 2025 from 4.14 million tonnes two years earlier, according to data compiled by PRS Legislative Research from government figures.
The decline highlights both the scale of India’s waste management challenge and the difficulty of interpreting national waste statistics as collection, reporting and processing systems evolve.
Against that backdrop, the United Nations Development Programme in India and Hindustan Unilever Ltd. have launched a new phase of their partnership to strengthen plastic circularity, targeting support for 50,000 Safai Mitras and waste management systems across 50 cities by 2028. The initiative expands a seven year collaboration that has already supported 24,000 waste workers and waste segregation across 120,000 households in five states.
The next phase will focus on four areas: formalizing and improving livelihoods for waste workers, strengthening urban waste management systems, improving collection and recycling efficiency, and transferring knowledge between cities and institutions.
The scale of the new target is significant. Moving from 24,000 workers supported during the previous seven years to 50,000 by 2028 implies a substantially faster implementation rate, while expanding coverage from five states to 50 cities places greater emphasis on the capacity of urban local bodies to sustain the systems after initial project support ends.
India has spent the past several years building a regulatory framework intended to shift responsibility for plastic waste beyond municipal governments.
The country’s Extended Producer Responsibility system for plastic packaging requires producers, importers and brand owners to finance and account for the processing of packaging waste placed on the market. The Central Pollution Control Board operates a centralized EPR framework covering registration, recycling and other forms of end of life processing.
The policy direction is also becoming more demanding. Under India’s EPR guidelines, minimum recycling targets for plastic packaging are scheduled to rise across categories, with targets for 2027 to 2028 and beyond reaching 60% to 80%, depending on the packaging category.
That creates an increasingly important distinction between collecting plastic and actually establishing circular material flows.
A municipality can improve collection rates without necessarily increasing high quality recycling. Plastic can also be collected but remain difficult to recycle because of contamination, mixed materials, inadequate sorting or insufficient demand for recycled resin.
The UNDP and HUL program is consequently targeting the entire chain from segregation and collection through recovery and recycling rather than focusing exclusively on the volume of plastic collected.
The new program puts Safai Mitras at the center of the circular economy model. UNDP and HUL intend to support the formalization and improvement of livelihoods for 50,000 waste workers, with particular emphasis on women. The objective is not simply social protection. Integrating waste workers into formal municipal and recycling systems can improve traceability, collection reliability and access to training and protective equipment while strengthening the supply of recoverable materials.
India’s waste economy continues to depend heavily on workers operating at different points of the collection and recovery chain. Formalization can therefore address a structural weakness in circularity: the material value of waste may exist, but the systems required to capture that value consistently are often fragmented.
The new program will work with 50 cities and urban local bodies to develop what UNDP describes as efficient, decentralized and resilient end to end waste management systems. That approach shifts attention toward municipal capacity, where the practical success of national recycling requirements is ultimately determined.
India’s EPR regime provides a regulatory incentive for companies to increase recycling, but the effectiveness of the system depends on the quality of data and verification throughout the value chain.
The CPCB’s plastic EPR portal requires producers, importers and brand owners to register and fulfill obligations related to processing plastic packaging waste. The system covers recycling, reuse and specified end of life treatment routes.
The regulatory architecture has also continued to evolve. India introduced amendments to its Plastic Waste Management Rules in 2024, 2025 and 2026, while the CPCB migrated its plastic EPR system to a Common EPR Portal in June 2026.
The transition toward a common digital platform could improve consistency in tracking obligations across different waste streams, but digital reporting alone cannot resolve physical bottlenecks in collection, sorting and recycling capacity.
That is where the UNDP and HUL initiative could have greater significance if it succeeds in connecting municipal systems with formal recycling markets. The objective is effectively to strengthen the infrastructure behind EPR rather than operate independently of it.
The value of recovered material depends on polymer type, contamination levels, sorting costs, transportation distances, processing technology and the price of virgin resin. When virgin plastic prices fall, recycled material can become less competitive unless regulation or procurement standards create additional demand.
This is why Project Circular Bharat, the HUL program under which the partnership operates, focuses on financially viable end to end recycling models.
The commercial question is particularly relevant for flexible and multilayer packaging, which can be more difficult to mechanically recycle than relatively homogeneous rigid plastics. Improving segregation and recovery therefore needs to be accompanied by investment in processing technologies and reliable markets for recycled output.
India’s EPR system attempts to address part of this challenge by creating mandatory recycling and recycled content requirements. Government guidelines also provide for minimum recycled content requirements in plastic packaging, creating a regulatory demand signal for secondary material.
The effectiveness of that mechanism will depend on whether recycled content requirements translate into sustained demand for material that meets quality specifications at commercially viable prices.
The decision to work across 50 cities is important because India’s plastic waste problem is highly decentralized. National rules can establish obligations, but urban local bodies determine many of the practical conditions under which waste is collected, segregated and transferred to processors.
The partnership will therefore focus on helping cities improve source segregation, recovery and recycling practices while strengthening institutional capacity.
This creates an opportunity to develop models that can be replicated across municipalities rather than relying on isolated demonstration projects. Knowledge transfer is explicitly included in the partnership, suggesting that lessons from individual cities are intended to be incorporated into broader implementation.
The challenge is maintaining consistency across cities with different levels of municipal finance, collection infrastructure, population density, informal waste worker networks and access to recycling facilities.
A model that works in a major metropolitan area may not translate directly to a smaller city without changes in collection economics and infrastructure.
For HUL, the partnership also reflects the changing nature of corporate responsibility under India’s EPR framework. Large consumer goods companies are increasingly required to demonstrate that packaging placed on the market is being managed after use. That creates a direct relationship between packaging design, waste collection, recycling capacity and regulatory compliance.
A circular economy strategy therefore extends beyond using recycled content or reducing packaging weight. It requires companies to understand what happens to packaging after it leaves the consumer.
The UNDP partnership provides HUL with a mechanism to work upstream with municipalities and waste workers while supporting downstream recycling systems.
That approach could become increasingly important as companies face more stringent reporting and compliance requirements and as India continues to develop digital systems for tracking plastic packaging obligations.
The 50,000 worker and 50 city targets provide measurable implementation milestones, but they do not by themselves establish whether plastic circularity is improving.
More consequential indicators will include the quantity and quality of plastic recovered, the proportion entering verified recycling processes, recycled resin output, worker income and formal employment, source segregation rates, municipal collection efficiency and the economic sustainability of participating recycling enterprises.
The partnership’s ability to produce those outcomes will depend on whether the four components it identifies can function together.
Social inclusion without stronger collection systems leaves material recovery constrained. Better collection without recycling capacity can shift the bottleneck downstream. Recycling facilities without reliable feedstock undermine utilization rates. And recycling capacity without stable demand for secondary material weakens the economics.
India’s expanding EPR framework provides the regulatory architecture, while programs such as the UNDP and HUL partnership are attempting to strengthen the physical and institutional infrastructure required to make that architecture work at city level. The next phase, covering 50,000 Safai Mitras and 50 cities through 2028, will test whether those systems can be replicated at sufficient scale while maintaining both environmental performance and economic viability.
