Waste management in India –HCCB

Waste management is one of those things that all of us shy away from. Give any man a chance to tidy up his surroundings, and I am sure he will shy away from the task before him. Also note that when I say tidy up his surroundings, I don’t mean his immediate surroundings, but places like his neighbourhood, areas in the city that are choked with soot and filth, etc. This apathy towards a problem that we are collectively responsible for, is the reason that our planet is at the brink of its own doom.

Plastic waste is a by-product of the manufacture of petrol, and comes with the caveat that they decompose very, very slowly. For instance, an ordinary bottle of plastic takes as much as 500 years to decompose in a landfill, while other forms, like lower grades of plastic used to make bags, take as many as 1000 years to decompose. But recycling plastic is a way out of this predicament.

Times like this call for each one of us, to come to the frontlines and do their best to save the Earth. HCCB is exactly one such company, whose innovations serve to create not only better beverages, but also better ways to protect the planet from human intervention.

Waste management in India is an umbrella term that includes plastic waste management and environmental sustainability. Recently HCCB pulled off a plastic waste management initiative in Goa, where safaii mitras or waste pickers were incentivized to bring plastic to the waste collection centre. In another initiative, as much as 10 wards in Mumbai were adopted by HCCB for recycling plastic, where several new types of products were made from the recycled plastic, like benches, t-shirts, waste paper bins, containers, sports goods etc. Both initiatives aim at removing as many as several tons worth of plastic waste from the streets every day.

With these initiatives, the company aims at ensuring a circular economy of plastics, recycling and reusing as much plastic as possible, reducing their impact on the environment.