The upcoming Global Zero Waste Forum in Istanbul, Turkey from June 5-7 is not just another international conference with glossy banners and large stage panels. Its core theme is “zero waste for climate action” and this forum also serves as a precursor to COP 31 which will also be held in Turkey later this year.
The Forum is expecting participation of over 500 partners across governments, UN entities, cities, businesses, academia, and civil society, including the attendance of more than 100 ministers. The forum will highlight the role of zero waste solutions as a key pillar of climate action and demonstrate practical patchways for implementing zero-waste pathways and help mobilize finance and investment in this sector. For India, represented by the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), this forum should matter because the country’s growing waste crisis is no longer just a sanitation issue; it is an environmental, public health, and climate bomb which is ticking to explode.
The lessons for India could not be clearer- No amount of brooms and bins can sweep away the waste we generate and the real solutions lie elsewhere- “waste prevention.”
For over a decade, India has been obsessed with the idea of ‘visual cleanliness’ or the appearance of neatness. The policy focus has always been on waste “cleanups”, a painted wall, a dustbin at the right corner, a plogging event with gloves and tongs and social media captions. These feel good clean ups are good for nothing as they merely shift the dirt somewhere but always near marginalised communities.
What such events mask are the difficult questions about the generation of waste itself. Why is the waste there in the first place? Who produced it? Who sold it? Why was it not designed out? Why was it not prevented upstream? Refusal to address these questions has led to the rise of false technological solutions to address the waste crisis such as waste to energy (WTE) incineration, co-processing of waste in cement kilns and plastic credits.
Such technologies often produce hazardous pollution and obscure the root causes of the waste problem which is overproduction, overpackaging, throwaway consumption, broken sorting and weak enforcement. What looks like cleanliness is often only concealment; a political distraction that hides waste at the margins while allowing the system that produces it to continue untouched.
The zero-waste agenda espoused by the Global Zero Waste Forum, starts from a different premise: waste is a design failure. The Zero Waste Foundation which is hosting the Global Zero Waste Forum says that, “Zero waste is not simply managing waste better after it has been created; it is about preventing waste in the first place, redesigning material flows, keeping resources in use, and phasing out disposal lock-ins.” Unabated plastic production, single-use packaging, excessive food surplus, poor product design, the absence of segregation systems and decentralised waste management all create waste by default.
In a Zero Waste system, every product is reused, repaired, refilled, or shared and hence avoids new extraction, transport, packaging, and production. Though recycling is sometimes helpful, zero waste goes further and questions why disposable material is produced in the first place. For example, a reusable bottle prevents waste generation repeatedly while a single-use plastic bottle still needs to be manufactured again and again. Thus, a reusable bottle is a zero waste solution that is deeply linked to the circular economy as it attempts to slow material throughput itself.
However, India’s flagship Swachh Bharat Mission and the new Solid Waste Management rules 2026, still primarily oriented toward collection, segregation, processing, and final disposal of waste.
According to the zero waste roadmap report Green Chennai initiative, by moving towards zero waste, the city of Chennai could generate an annual savings of Rs 277-388 crore, create 6,356 new jobs, 286 start-up opportunities, offset 1.3 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually, reduce per capita waste generation by 15 per cent, and produce 339,012 organic manure annually. Furthermore, the entire bus transportation system of Chennai could be retrofitted to run on biogas from waste and offset 1.3 million tons of CO2 emissions. At its core, zero waste rests on a truth we are deeply familiar with: “Prevention is the best cure.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies solid waste disposal as one of the major human methane sources, and according to the UNEP, waste sector now accounts for 20 per cent of all anthropogenic methane emissions. In 2016, solid waste management generated about 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2, which is about 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For a country which generates 1,70,338 tons per day (TPD) of solid waste, the zero waste strategy represents a “low hanging fruit” for climate action.
Furthermore, about 55 per cent of this waste is biodegradable or organic in nature which can be easily managed in decentralized waste management systems such as composting and anaerobic (biogas) technologies. Switching to this “old” technology is the “gold” standard under the zero waste framework as it treats organic waste not as something to be dumped or burnt, but as a resource to be used through low-cost, carbon-neutral, and indigenous systems.
However, India has also much to learn from the expensive yet failed WTE incineration model of Hyderabad which led to an overflowing landfill dump yard emitting about 5.9 tonnes of methane every hour, turning what is often seen as a sanitation issue into a major climate threat. Zero waste is a practical, scalable, and socially beneficial climate strategy.
The biggest institutional milestone for Zero Waste came in December 2022, when the UN General Assembly officially proclaimed 30 March as the International Day of Zero Waste, led by Turkey with support from 105 countries including India and countries such as Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa and Spain etc. Furthermore, the UN now repeatedly frames waste as part of the “triple planetary crisis”.
Zero waste is also politically significant because the UN has moved away from framing waste as a narrow “recycling” problem. Instead, it now spotlights and critiques wasteful production. For India, being part of the Zero Waste Forum in Turkey offers an opportunity to engage with an important emerging climate agenda. However, India should not embrace zero waste merely as a branding exercise; realizing its full potential will require preventing waste generation, redesign products and packaging, strengthen reuse systems, and phaseout dependence on disposal-oriented solutions.
Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran is a senior research associate with the Centre for Financial Accountability. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.