Скачать или смотреть CircularNxt 2025 Panel Discussion on Plastics Re-imagined featuring Deepa Sai (EcoHQ)

Plastics, reimagined — not as a slogan, but as a system.
On June 5th, 2025, at CircularNXT2025, I joined the flagship panel 'Plastics Reimagined: Systems, Solutions, and the Gaps Between'.

As Founder of ecoHQ and Co-organiser of the CircularNXT2025 summit by RecycleNXT, this conversation mattered because it refused the comfort zone of circularity narratives.

Moderated by Dhanush, the panel brought together practitioners across very different parts of the plastics value chain:
Anish Malpani, Ferdin Sylvester, and Kunwar Rahul Singh.
Instead of debating whether plastic is 'good' or 'bad', we examined how plastic actually moves through systems — and where those systems fail.

We asked the hard questions:
Are bioplastics, recycling, and incineration real solutions or context-limited stopgaps?
What would it take to make reuse-first models mainstream, not marginal?
How do SMEs, informal workers, and frontline communities move from invisible labour to recognised leaders in circular systems?

A recurring theme was the gap between policy intent and lived reality. EPR frameworks, while necessary, struggle with traceability, enforcement, and data gaps that erase informal labour and regional complexity. Reuse models remain structurally unsupported — constrained by hygiene norms, reverse logistics, liability concerns, and misaligned incentives. What became clear: plastic circularity fails when solutions are layered onto broken systems without redesign.

The session balanced macro urgency with micro constraints, asking what real reuse infrastructure would look like if designed for equity, hygiene, dignity, and scale — not just compliance. This wasn’t a feel-good panel. And that was its strength. Circularity isn’t clean or linear. But it is possible — if we design for reality, not rhetoric.