Maharashtra's Pollution Control Chief Takes India's Environmental Governance Case to Europe

BusinessWire India
Amsterdam [Netherlands] / Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], May 8: Siddhesh Kadam, Chairman of the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) and a Shiv Sena leader within Maharashtra's Mahayuti ruling alliance, appeared before a high-profile international panel at the Plastic Recycling Show Europe 2026 (PRSE 2026) in Amsterdam on 6 May, becoming the only serving Indian government official on the panel and the first Maharashtra regulator to address this global forum.
The panel, titled 'Importance of Traceability for Global Plastic Trade,' brought together regulators, recycling industry leaders, and policymakers from across Europe and Asia at what is widely recognised as the continent's pre-eminent plastic industry event. For Mr. Kadam, the appearance was both a platform and a responsibility, to represent India's regulatory position at a moment when global plastic governance is in active and consequential flux.
Central to Mr. Kadam's address was a fact that surprised several European delegates: India's national plastic packaging traceability system is already operational. Since 1 July 2025, every plastic packaging unit produced or sold in India must carry a machine-readable QR code or barcode linked in real time to the manufacturer's registration on the Central Pollution Control Board's EPR portal, a mandate that covers over twenty million tonnes of plastic annually, with no exemptions by industry sector or company size. Cross-referencing with GST registration data ensures the system has teeth.
The European Union's comparable mechanism, the Digital Product Passport under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, is projected to extend to plastics and packaging only around 2028 to 2030. India's system is live today, at a national scale no single European country can match. Mr. Kadam placed this fact before the Amsterdam audience without triumphalism, framing it instead as the basis for a bilateral technical conversation between India and Europe on aligning their respective traceability architectures.
"India is not asking to be written into the global plastic conversation. It is already in it with a framework, with enforcement data, and with the scale that makes its participation indispensable to any solution that actually works."
-- Siddhesh Kadam, Chairman, MPCB, at PRSE 2026, Amsterdam

On Maharashtra's enforcement record, between June 2024 and January 2025, MPCB flying squads conducted over fifteen thousand retail inspections across the state's thirty-six districts, seized fourteen and a half tonnes of illegal single-use plastic, and imposed penalties on nine hundred retailers, a ground-level compliance exercise that gave his international audience a concrete measure of regulatory intent.
He also offered European delegates an unfamiliar perspective on India's circular economy infrastructure: the four million informal waste workers, ragpickers, kabadiwalas, and scrap aggregators who recover approximately eighty percent of urban plastic in Indian cities, contributing nearly seventy percent of all PET recycling, at near-zero public expenditure. He noted that India's 2025 EPR amendments have begun formally integrating this workforce into the verified supply chain, enabling EPR credits to flow through recyclers who can document their sourcing from informal collectors. The argument drew a pointed response from European panellists accustomed to framing informality as a governance gap rather than a cost-effective circularity model.
"Four million Indians collect, sort and channel plastic every single day -- without a deposit-return scheme, without a government subsidy, without a fleet of collection trucks. Europe spends billions to do what they do organically. That is not a problem. That is a lesson."
-- Siddhesh Kadam, Chairman, MPCB, at PRSE 2026, Amsterdam
Mr. Kadam also addressed the crisis gripping European plastic recycling, nearly one million tonnes of operational capacity lost between 2023 and 2025, with plant closures rising by fifty percent in the first half of 2025 alone, despite industry investment of five billion euros in the preceding three years. He attributed the collapse not to a failure of capital or technology but to an enforceable traceability gap: the inability of regulators to reliably distinguish verified recycled material from cheaper, mislabelled virgin plastic imports had made the market for genuine recyclates commercially untenable.
On the European Commission's planned 2026 import controls, new customs codes to distinguish virgin from recycled plastic, and expanded audits of overseas processing facilities, Mr. Kadam offered India's position directly: traceability-based import requirements are legitimate regulatory instruments, provided they are applied on consistent terms to all market participants. India supports the principle; it reserves judgment on the implementation. He further proposed that MPCB and India's CPCB are ready to engage with European counterparts on technical alignment between India's QR architecture and the EU's Digital Product Passport, noting that the two frameworks are built on compatible international standards and that interoperability is achievable with political commitment on both sides.
Speaking on the United Nations negotiations towards a global legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, Mr. Kadam called for the adoption of a universal plastic traceability data standard as a core treaty instrument, a single data language that would allow regulators across jurisdictions to verify material provenance and recycled content along the full supply chain. The proposal found visible traction among European delegates, several of whom engaged Mr. Kadam in further discussion on the sidelines of the session.
"The global plastic crisis will not be resolved by one continent's regulations or one country's ambition. It will be resolved when the major economies agree on a common language for traceability -- and then enforce it. India is ready to help write that language."
-- Siddhesh Kadam, Chairman, MPCB, at PRSE 2026, Amsterdam
Mr. Kadam's participation at PRSE 2026 represents a significant step in India's engagement with the international environmental governance agenda at a practitioner level. His presence on the panel as a serving regulator responsible for enforcing plastic waste rules across a jurisdiction of one hundred and thirty million people, gave India's position a specificity and credibility that is often absent from high-level diplomatic statements on environmental matters. Officials in Mumbai indicated that follow-up bilateral conversations with European regulatory counterparts are now being explored.
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