Grassroots Innovations Emerge as Hidden Engine of India’s Plastic Circular Economy

India generates millions of tonnes of plastic waste each year, and while policymakers and corporations dominate the conversation about how to manage it, a new study argues that some of the most inventive solutions are bubbling up from below. Research published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology examined fifteen community-led initiatives across the country, from school-based plastic buy-back schemes to waste picker cooperatives, and found that grassroots innovation is quietly reshaping how plastic flows through Indian society. The work, led by Laure-Elise Ruoso of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney, together with colleagues in India and Australia, offers one of the first systematic portraits of how ordinary citizens, informal workers and small organisations are building a circular economy from the ground up.

The concept of grassroots innovation refers to networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development and sustainable consumption. Unlike the top-down model of innovation driven by policy, markets and formal science, grassroots initiatives typically emerge in response to social or environmental problems that public and private institutions have failed to solve. They often satisfy needs unmet by the state or industry, reshape social relations by involving disadvantaged groups, and enhance communities’ capacity to participate in socio-political life. India has a particularly rich history here: the Honey Bee Network, founded in 1988, has spent decades documenting and disseminating innovations devised by rural inventors, navigating the delicate balance between spreading ideas and protecting them from co-option by powerful actors.

To study plastic-focused initiatives, the research team developed a composite framework drawing on circular economy literature, studies of community waste management, and evaluative frameworks from the sustainability field. They characterised each initiative across six categories: context, appropriateness, governance and management, innovation, diffusion, and outcomes and impacts. Data came from thirteen semi-structured interviews with people involved in the fifteen initiatives, which spanned states including Haryana, New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Assam and Kerala. The team coded transcripts deductively against the framework categories, with researchers in India and Australia cross-checking each other’s interpretations to strengthen the credibility of the qualitative analysis.

One striking finding concerned the circular economy strategies the initiatives actually pursued. Although the circular economy is often imagined as a hierarchy of actions, with refusing and reusing plastic ranked above recycling, ten of the fifteen initiatives focused on recycling, with only two each devoted to refuse, reuse and repurpose, and one to recovery. The researchers suggest this reflects a desire to tackle immediate, visible environmental problems such as littered streets and overflowing landfills, as well as the fact that collection can be organised with limited resources. The pattern hints at an untapped opportunity: with better support, community initiatives might branch into higher-order strategies that prevent plastic waste from arising in the first place.

Context, perhaps counterintuitively, was more often a barrier than a booster. Interviewees rarely cited enabling conditions, and where the regulatory environment did help, it was usually through municipal by-laws that made activities such as multi-way waste segregation compulsory, lending legitimacy even when enforcement was weak. National campaigns like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and state bans on single-use plastics also created favourable conditions. More typically, however, initiatives ran into structural walls. India’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules were described by one participant as functioning less as a catalyst for recycling than as a business model that channels plastic to cement kilns, because the collection and segregation infrastructure needed for genuine recycling simply does not exist in many places. Another interviewee noted that tender prices paid under EPR, as low as 1.5 to 2 rupees per unit of service, made it impossible for a waste picker-managed collection centre to compete.

Infrastructure gaps compounded these regulatory frustrations. Some initiatives collected more plastic than local facilities could process; others found that the waste they gathered ended up in landfill or was burned because recycling centres were inaccessible or nonexistent. Building new infrastructure was often impossible without a reliable power supply or sufficient waste volumes to justify the investment. The low commercial value of certain plastics, and the unsuitability of contaminated material for recovery, further undermined efforts to repurpose or recycle what communities collected. Even the availability of affordable alternatives to plastic products proved a bottleneck, with one campaign for small vendors unable to supply viable substitutes at the time of its activities.

Where initiatives did succeed, three aspects of governance and management stood out: collaboration, stakeholder engagement and financial sustainability. Multi-stakeholder collaboration was the most commonly cited success factor, bringing together urban local bodies, waste management corporations, recyclers, community organisations and households. In one housing society segregation program, the municipality mandated segregation and funded bins, the waste corporation processed the material, and households operated the system. Public sector involvement also conferred trust, with one participant reporting that it generated considerable faith and comfort among citizens. Cross-sectoral partnerships proved equally important, as when an environmental group concerned about menstrual pad pollution joined forces with health departments after discovering the scale of health problems women were experiencing.

Engaging communities required overcoming real resistance. Interviewees described residents who found segregation an inconvenient burden, questioned the legitimacy of campaigns lacking government backing, doubted that individual actions could change anything, or simply prioritised livelihoods over environmental concerns. Successful initiatives countered these attitudes by providing early, personalised information, demonstrating tangible results, such as park benches made from beach-collected plastic, and working through existing structures like women’s groups, schools and religious leaders. Financial sustainability remained the Achilles heel: one initiative collapsed after its pilot phase when funding dried up, others limped along on personal funds, and public money was described as very minimal even where it existed. Some organisations achieved self-sufficiency through stall fees at annual exhibitions or by helping participants build businesses selling cloth bags or running their own waste collection centres.

Diffusion, when it happened, followed three distinct scaling patterns: strategic, demand-led and participant-led, alongside replication by governments or citizens and translation of ideas to new settings. A school initiative that lets children pay fees with collected plastic was invited by a state government to expand, though without funding the expansion stalled. Drop-off point schemes grew organically as participants established and managed new sites themselves. The innovations themselves clustered around three foci: most shaped alternative material arrangements through reuse, repurposing and recycling; seven built individual competences; and five created alternative socio-economic settings, notably by formalising informal waste pickers, providing them with identity documents, insurance, bank accounts and salaried employment. The authors argue this last dimension deserves more attention, since the circular economy has long been criticised for privileging economic and material flows over social equity, and in India, where the informal sector handles much of the nation’s waste, grassroots initiatives may be uniquely positioned to embed justice in the transition, provided policymakers treat them as stakeholders in their own right rather than passive beneficiaries.

Subject of Research: Grassroots innovation initiatives supporting a circular economy for plastics in India

Article Title: Transitioning to a circular economy for plastics in India: what role for grassroots innovation?

Article References: Ruoso, L.-E., Goswami, G., Retamal, M., Panandiker, A. P., Gupta, A., & Niazi, Z. (2026). Transitioning to a circular economy for plastics in India: what role for grassroots innovation?. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00194-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00194-x

Keywords: grassroots innovation, circular economy, plastic pollution, India, waste management, recycling, informal waste sector, waste pickers, sustainability transitions, extended producer responsibility, community initiatives, social innovation