New Delhi – India has stopped adding items to its single-use plastic ban and started trying to enforce the list it already has. The instrument of choice is not an inspector. It is a barcode.
Since July 2025, plastic packaging must carry a QR code, barcode or unique number identifying the manufacturer or brand owner, under the marking requirements of the Plastic Waste Management Rules.
Traceability shifts the burden of proof
The historic weakness of the ban was attribution. An inspector finding banned items in a market could seize stock from a trader and rarely reach the producer, so enforcement fell on the smallest and least culpable participant.
Marking reverses that. A banned item carrying a code identifies its maker, moving liability up the chain to the entity that can actually stop production.
Where enforcement still fails
District-level inventories and field inspection records are largely absent from the public domain, which makes the intensity of enforcement impossible to verify from outside. Banned items reappear in informal markets where monitoring is thin.
Unmarked product from an unregistered producer defeats the traceability mechanism entirely, and the informal manufacturing sector is precisely where such product originates.
The alternatives problem is a price problem
Compostable items meeting Indian Standard IS 17088 are exempt from the ban. Paper, bagasse, bamboo, jute and steel substitutes are all available, and the biodegradable tableware and packaging market has grown into the billions of dollars.
They also cost more than what they replace. For a street vendor operating on single-digit margins, the ban is a direct cost with no offsetting benefit, which is why compliance correlates so closely with the formality of the seller.
There is a further complication. Certified compostable material requires industrial composting to break down, and most Indian cities lack that infrastructure. A compostable cup in a landfill behaves much like a plastic one.
Source: Plastic Waste Management Rules marking and labelling requirements, and Indian Standard IS 17088 for compostable plastics.
