This past winter, I drove on the Srinagar-Gulmarg Road in Kashmir four times after an average gap of two weeks between each trip. On each trip I found over 70 heaps of variegated plastic waste which included discarded snack packets, fast-food wrappers and single-use packaging lying scattered along the roadsides from Narbal to Tangmarg, roughly 10 km long distance on the Srinagar-Gulmarg Road.
Most of the heaps bore clear signs of what happens to the plastic waste as charred plastic and ash could be seen at some dumping spots, evidence that the waste was burnt. During one of the trips, I even witnessed plastic waste was being burnt at a government-run disposal site at Gulmarg. National Green Tribunal (NGT) has ordered complete prohibition on open burning of waste on lands, including landfill sites.
While the Gulmarg road offers a snapshot of the country’s plastic waste problem, burning of plastic is spread all across Kashmir and other parts of the country at individual and institutional level. Residents say there are no functional and organised systems for waste collection. When garbage accumulates, people simply burn it as I repeatedly witnessed during my field reporting.
Villagers in rural Kashmir said garbage sheds have been set up in different villages by the government’s rural development department. But without staff, machinery and regular monitoring, these units exist more on paper than in practice, they said. In the absence of reliable collection systems, residents said they are left with little choice but to dispose of waste themselves, most commonly by burning it.
Kashmir’s regional director for Pollution Control Committee, Abhijeet Joshi, said the main problem is the supply and demand — which is at the core of plastic pollution. “Unless we reduce demand [of plastic], the problem will continue to persist,” Joshi said.
He added that all stakeholders need to contribute towards reducing the demand of single-use plastic and “decide the direction in which we want to move”.
“We seize polythene wherever we find it or receive inputs. I currently have around 50 tonnes stored outside because we’ve run out of space. In just the past three to four months, we’ve confiscated nearly 30 tonnes of polythene bags from godowns,” he told me in an interview in his Srinagar office.
Joshi added that all the 17 departments — including the Srinagar Municipal Corporation, Deputy Commissioners, Police Stations, forest officials and panchayats — authorised by the government to act, need to carry out seizures consistently to make the ban on single-use plastic impactful.
From scattered heaps of plastic along highways and village roads, often set on fire in the open, to the towering waste-to-energy (WTE) plants in cities, plastic burning is quietly fuelling toxic air pollution and accelerating climate emissions under both informal and institutional systems in India.
Since the late 1970s, single-use plastics have become the vanguard of plastics production with less than 1 per cent of all single use plastics items getting recycled.
In the absence of effective waste management systems, millions of tonnes of waste are burned every year across the country, either in open fields, roadside dumps or incinerators resulting in toxic air and climate emissions.
Such practices are technically illegal. India’s Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 and NGT prohibit open burning of waste. Yet the practice remains widespread.
According to this study, India’s renewable energy policies are likely to reduce emissions in the heat and electricity sector, and manufacturing industries, in the mid-term. PM2.5 emissions from open waste burning, on the other hand, hardly changed in the decade from 2010 to 2020, the study says and warns that “if current trends continue, open waste burning is likely to become India’s largest source of air pollution by 2035.”
As per official statistics, municipal solid waste (MSW) in India is projected to increase from 62 million tonnes at present to about 165 million tonnes by 2030 because of rapid urbanisation.
A study published in Nature in September 2024, however, notes that official statistics are different from ground reality. “They do not fully account for rural areas, the open burning of uncollected waste, or materials collected by the informal recycling sector,” Joshua Cottom, lead author of the study told me in an interview.
Roughly, the study says, 56.8 million tonnes of MSW is open burned annually in India, with 5.8 million tonnes of this being plastic. Plastic pollution emissions, the study says, are concentrated in Southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, with India emerging as the single largest contributor, emitting about 9.3 million tonnes annually, or nearly one-fifth of the global total.
This study highlights that plastics are a particularly problematic waste stream when it comes to open burning given the production of black carbon emissions and diseases such as increased risk of heart disease, respiratory issues and neurological disorders associated with burning of plastics.
Many attempts to reach out to Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) for the board’s reaction didn’t yield any result. An email with questions to CPCB also remains unanswered. This article will be updated if and when a response is received.
WTE plants are presented as a waste management solution, with India’s WTE market valued at $1.5 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2034.
However, environmental activists like Chythenyen DK from the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) argue that these plants are “pure greenwashing.”
Quoting a November 2025 IIT Bombay Policy Brief which criticises these plants for privatising profits and having environmental standards significantly lower than EU norms, Chythenyen asserted that US and EU are moving away from such facilities, while India is relaxing environmental norms, aiming to establish over 550 WTE plants by 2050.
“In Chennai, a 10-ton incinerator in Manali was permanently shut down by the NGT following a fact-finding report detailing heavy metal pollution. Another operational incinerator in Kodungaiyur is currently under scrutiny,” he said.
Chythenyen and other activists point out that waste-to-energy plants require dry combustible material to maintain efficient burning. “In practice, this often means feeding large quantities of plastic into the incinerators.”
While such plants generate electricity, Chythenyen said, they also produce carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants, thereby shifting the waste problem from landfills to smokestacks.
The plastic pollution crisis begins long before waste reaches a roadside dump or incinerator.
Plastic production itself is a carbon-intensive process with 3.4 per cent of the world’s total emissions coming from plastic production, a number that is set to grow considerably as the production of plastics is expected to triple by 2060.
Most plastics are made from fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, and the manufacturing process releases significant greenhouse gases and air pollutants, said Dharmesh Shah, environmental researcher and activist, adding that 75 per cent of emissions occur during plastic’s extraction, refining, and processing phases.
According to Shah, there is little research on pollution from plastic production in India. But where refineries exist, people are complaining, and there are ongoing NGT cases against pollution from these refineries, he said.
Despite growing awareness, Shah said, India’s plastic policies remain heavily focused on downstream solutions such as recycling, bans on specific products or waste-to-energy projects. The upstream drivers of the crisis — rising plastic production and consumption — remain largely unaddressed, he said.
Scientific studies and environmental groups argue that meaningful change will require reducing plastic manufacturing and consumption, improving waste segregation at the source and investing in decentralised recycling systems rather than large incineration plants.
Athar Parvaiz is a resident fellow at the Climate Change Media Hub, Asian College of Journalism.