When was the last time you scooped your favourite ice-cream? Oh, by the way, talking about ice-cream, if you had a treat of the Kwality Walls Chocolate Ice-cream with your family, there is something you might have missed out on the packaging. As observed, 700 ml family packs of Kwality Walls are now being printed with instructions on how to clean and dispose of the packaging into the garbage bin so as to be subjected to the recycling process further.
So this might be the first time when any Ice-cream manufacturer has displayed its intent for environmental protection. With the new ice-cream packaging out in the market, Kwality Walls is surely doing an environmental thing i.e. promoting recycling, which would be more than just melting your heart through its tasty ice-creams.
But having such instructions in place, are we really up for such indications? Recalling the universal 3Rs – we are more inclined to the first two Rs, that is, Reduce and Reuse, but when it comes to recycling, there is still quite an absurdity among the society to recycle a particular product or packaging.
There is a system of people over an app where they work to bridge the gap between you and the recycling industry. The most common examples of such systems are kabadiwalas and raddiwalas.
These systems operate by collecting metals, plastic and paper waste right from the doorsteps and drop them off at the recycling centers to generate profit. But the problem that persists is the mindset.
How many of us take that one extra step of segregating the waste and recyclables and non-recyclables, so as to put them into their respective bins? Roshnee Desai, the founder of the design agency LOCAL, pointed out that the most obvious problem in the last mile step of recycling especially in a developing nation like India is poor infrastructure. She added that one must keep in mind that different materials have to be recycled differently.
A paper ice cream packaging will be recycled differently from a cardboard carton box. She clarified that although the initiative of Kwality Walls is a good step, it’s unclear what kind of recycling process it would undergo because only then it can be properly segregated and pushed further for recycling. The fact is, different materials undergo different recycling operations and the instructions on the packaging don’t seem to go that far.
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