A discarded PET bottle can feed a furnace, block a drain or help pay for a waste picker’s dinner, depending on what happens after someone throws it away.
Pakistan’s plastic debate rarely follows that journey, because announcing a ban is politically simpler than building a system that keeps materials circulating and helps tackle plastic pollution. Yet a restriction that ignores existing recovery markets can remove livelihoods without removing pollution, leaving the country with an environmental crisis compounded by a social one. Before policymakers decide which bottle must disappear, they should understand that without waste segregation and integrating informal worker value chains, bans don’t work.
According to UN COMTRADE & EU SwitchAsia, Pakistan generates about 50 million tonnes of waste annually, including 2.7-2.8 million tonnes of plastic waste. These figures should compel a debate about the entire waste system, rather than an assumption that banning one product will resolve it.
Treating all plastics alike obscures the information needed to regulate them effectively. PET, or polyethene terephthalate, illustrates this distinction because discarded beverage bottles already support an extensive recovery economy. As per life cycle impact assessment studies conducted by SDPI, approximately 80-90 per cent of PET bottles are collected and recycled, considerably above the recycling rate for plastics overall. Such estimates require better national verification, but they identify an important reality: PET has a market value that encourages collection. Much of this recovery depends on waste pickers and kabadiwalas, whose contribution remains largely invisible when the state discusses plastic pollution.
The bottle passes from collectors to scrap dealers and aggregators, who sort and sell it to recycling enterprises. After separation by material and colour, bottles are stripped of contaminants, washed, shredded into flakes and dried. Depending on the facility and intended product, suitable flakes undergo further processing, including melting, filtration and pelletizing, to produce recycled PET resin. This material can become polyester fibre, strapping, or other manufactured products, while many enterprises use certified decontamination processes for food-contact bottle-to-bottle recycling. The value chain therefore extends well beyond the factory gate, supporting collection, trading, transport and processing.
Pakistan already has enterprises showing these possibilities at different scales; for example, the Novatex facility has installed bottle-to-bottle recycling capacity exceeding 24,000 tonnes annually, while Ismail Resin’s Karachi facility is designed to support substantial PET recovery and similarly, Gatron Industries in Karachi recycled over 94.6 million PET bottles in a single fiscal year. Eco Bricks, based in Islamabad, recycles PET into coasters and planters and Faisalabad-based technoPET produces recycled PET materials and industrial strapping. WWF Pakistan has documented PET recovery connections extending to Peshawar and Mardan.
Beyond PET, Green Earth Recycling manufactures products from recovered plastics, while Davaam and Concept Loop also illustrate another route for plastic upcycling. Another woman-led enterprise, Green Plastic, manufactures 100 per cent biodegradable bags using organic waste as an alternative to single-use plastics and sells them in some Islamabad markets as well.
These enterprises process different materials, but together show that waste can be commercially viable; unfortunately, policymakers have not acknowledged or introduced these to consumers before imposing blanket bans.
SDPI’s work in Sahiwal, supported by the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Environmental Technology Centre and undertaken with the Akhtar Hameed Khan Foundation, brings this argument into a secondary city. The SME-led recycling pilot worked with Hafiz Traders, Claro Access Limited and Ma Sha Allah Industry, examining their equipment, business models and links with suppliers. Hafiz Traders operates in PET aggregation, washing and flake processing, Claro Access focuses on quality-oriented PET processing, and Ma Sha Allah handles PET alongside other plastic streams. The intervention strengthened existing enterprises rather than assuming recovery had to begin from nothing.
The project team working with the Sahiwal government recorded about 1.2 tonnes of plastic intake during a 2-month monitoring cycle and engaged around 26 workers across participating enterprises, including permanent employees and informal labourers. The experience also establishes why registering informal workers and connecting them to recognised enterprises should become a policy priority, alongside safer work and reliable purchasing arrangements.
Scaling this approach requires confronting the point where material value is most often lost: mixed waste. Municipal companies collect substantial quantities of waste, but collection followed by disposal cannot substitute for resource recovery. Coverage remains uneven, and open dumping and burning persist. Pakistan needs collection systems that keep separate waste streams from households and businesses through transport and processing, because asking citizens to segregate serves little purpose if collection trucks mix their carefully separated materials again.
Integrated Resource Recovery Centres (IRRCs) at the union council level would provide a practical connection between neighbourhood collection and recycling markets, drawing on community-based recovery models established and scaled up in many cities by Akhtar Hameed Khan institutions. Registered collectors could bring materials to centres equipped for weighing, recording and sorting, with conveyor belts where throughput justifies them. Source segregation must remain the first priority, while centre-based sorting removes remaining contamination. Clean organics could move to composting and plastics could be separated by polymer and grade before being sold through kabadiwala networks to SMEs and larger recyclers under transparent arrangements.
Organic waste makes this system essential for reasons extending beyond plastics. Approximately 60 per cent of Pakistan’s waste is organic, while commonly cited composition estimates place food waste at around 30 per cent of municipal waste overall. Hotels, restaurants and caterers contribute to this burden, alongside households and markets, while post-harvest losses reflect failures in storage, handling and transport. For a country confronting serious food insecurity, discarding edible food also wastes the water, energy and agricultural labour invested in producing it. Safe surplus-food redistribution should precede composting, which should receive unavoidable, segregated organic residues.
The same system must distinguish ordinary recyclables from hazardous industrial, medical and electronic waste. Imported waste creates an additional concern when material entering under scrap classifications contains contaminants or fractions for which Pakistan lacks environmentally sound processing capacity. Calling a shipment a resource does not establish that it can be safely recycled. Import controls must therefore require credible classification, traceable destinations and verified processing capability, so that recycling businesses receive usable feedstock without communities inheriting the costs of foreign waste that cannot be responsibly managed.
Reliable domestic segregation would also improve the economics of recycling. Enterprises importing suitable scrap or virgin polymers could substitute locally recovered material from the IRRC where its quality and specifications allow, reducing exposure to foreign exchange pressures and international supply costs. Recovery centres should therefore operate as reliable suppliers linked to commercial demand.
Islamabad’s experience should have settled the question of whether a plastic ban can, by itself, resolve a waste crisis, yet policymakers continue to reach for prohibition while leaving the underlying system largely unattended. Years after restrictions were introduced, banned bags remain available and enforcement teams continue confiscating them from markets.
When the same products repeatedly return, the response cannot simply be another announcement promising stricter enforcement. It must involve examining why collection and recovery remain inadequate, why alternatives have not become accessible and why discarded materials still have so few organised pathways back into productive use. This is the central weakness of Pakistan’s approach to plastic pollution: restrictions receive political attention, while waste circularity receives insufficient institutional investment and even priority.
Pakistan needs a practical circular economy policy that makes these connections enforceable, with producer responsibility financing collection and recovery, municipalities maintaining segregated services and recyclers meeting environmental standards. Under PM Office direction, with support from UNEP & Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, and the Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination acting as the steering body, SDPI has developed a National Circular Economy Policy draft based on extensive field research, consultations and input from provincial line departments, businesses and SMEs, including informal waste sector representatives.
Targeted restrictions can support this transition where products are unnecessary or cannot be safely managed, but blanket PET bans without alternatives or recovery infrastructure risk undermining an existing recycling economy. Successful circular systems pair regulation with functioning services and viable markets. Pakistan should judge policy by the pollution it prevents and the livelihoods it improves, because a ban that leaves waste mixed and workers poorer would be a rebuke to the very environmental progress it claims to represent.
The writer is an environmental scientist and leads the ecological sustainability and circular economy programme at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad.
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