Environment

Nonrecyclable food and beverage packaging dominates the trash littering the Indian Himalayas, according to a recent report. Since 2018, regional alliances Zero Waste Himalaya  and Integrated Mountain Initiative have organized an annual campaign during the last week of May called The Himalayan Cleanup. Volunteers from schools and civil society organizations clean up sites across the Himalayas, followed by an audit identifying waste types and associated brands. In 2024, more than 15,000 volunteers across nine Indian Himalayan states collected 121,739 pieces of waste. Of this, 106,856, or nearly 90%, was some sort of plastic. Food and beverage packaging made up 84.2% of all plastic waste, of which 77% was nonrecyclable multilayered plastics, including food wrappers, beverage bottles, juice boxes, bottle caps, sachets, cutlery, bags, straws and lollipop sticks. Being nonrecyclable, these plastics hold no value for waste pickers and scrap dealers, so they are “strewn across the Himalayas and piling up in the landfills,” Kapil Chhetri, from Zero Waste Himalaya, told Mongabay by email.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• report cited