No discourse on development is possible today without adequate consideration of the environment component. There seems to be, however, a lack of basic understanding that environment and industrialisation or infrastructure development are complementary, not mutually exclusive, aspects of a country's growth and its people's well-being. The lookout, therefore, has been for a material that would combine convenience of usage with the most balanced combination of cost and functional merits from the ecological point of view. This is where plastic has scored over its nearest substitutes, like metal, glass or paper. In fact, if consumption grows at the current rate, India will be the third-largest polymer consumer in the world by 2010.

The flipside to this phenomenal growth is the misconceptions about plastics that are gaining ground, especially of late. Decision-makers, as also the people, are increasingly convinced that plastics are harmful, and its use should be banned. The possibility that a blanket ban on plastics could actually increase the environmental burden does not figure in these calculations. It is important, therefore, to understand the issue in the right perspective.

A high rate of growth of consumerism leads to a constant rise in municipal solid waste. A more balanced approach to high waste generation is recycling. We need to adopt the slogan "we don't waste, we recycle'. It is necessary to consider a few facts and figures to understand this concept better. The per capita consumption of plastics in India is 3.5 kg as compared to the global average of 19 kg. Plastics constitute three per cent of India's solid waste stream as against a world average of eight per cent. The Indian plastic industry also has an efficient recycling mechanism in place. About 60 per cent of all plastic in India is recycled as against a world average of 15