'Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic' Shows How Disposables Took Over People's Lives

In 1990, the average Indian consumed 0.7 kilograms of plastic a year. That compared with 100kg in the US and a world average of 12kg.

Despite the lack of formal recycling programs, the culture in India had long been to reuse or recycle things. Every household that got newspapers kept them in neat piles to sell to raddiwalas—scrap collectors – who in turn sold them on for recycling. Used clothes were mended or traded in for stainless steel kitchenware, while old saris were turned into curtains and cushion covers. Ghee tins were used to store spices, while old calendars were used to wrap textbooks. Cooking oil was used more than once, fruit peels were turned into face masks, bones and scraps were fed to pets, livestock or neighbourhood strays, and shoes were handed down.

Outside the home, tea was dispensed in tiny clay pots, freshly fried snacks were served on pieces of newspaper, and rice and lentils were sold in jute bags. Fast-food restaurants selling dosas and idlis used washable steel plates. In villages, farmers wore sandals fashioned out of used cart tyres.

Door-to-door pushcart vendors sold fresh, unwrapped vegetables every day. Weddings served thousands of guests on banana leaves. Soft drinks came in returnable glass bottles – people milled about to drink them outside shops before handing back the containers. Office workers ate home-cooked meals from steel tiffin boxes—an elaborate network of dabbawalas collected and returned the containers to people’s homes so that white-collar workers didn’t need to tote the multi-compartment dabbas to and from work.

But by the late 1980s India’s culture was quickly changing.

The best minds at Western consumer goods companies had set their sights on conquering India’s sprawling, and largely untapped, market. Nestlé was selling Maggi instant noodles. Unilever had an array of detergents and shampoos. Colgate’s toothpaste, toothbrushes and soaps were widely available. Johnson & Johnson was pushing its sanitary pads and baby powder, and Cadbury was selling chocolate and powdered drinks. They all used plastic packaging, joining an array of Indian companies like Godrej and Parle who were also relying on plastic to sell their products up and down the country.

In the summer of 1995, The Times of India published a telling interview with a small fruit seller who complained that customers had abandoned him for other sellers who offered plastic bags. People who had long brought their own bags or a clean handkerchief to carry fruit home in now demanded the convenience of a disposable bag provided on the spot. ‘If I did not give my customers a bag, they would not buy from me,’ he told the newspaper. ‘It became a fashion and I also started handing out plastic bags.’

By 1997, India’s consumption of plastic stood at 2kg per person—and Mumbai’s stood at 6kg. It was still very low compared to the rest of the world, but multiply 2kg by nearly a billion people and you get a lot of plastic. Plastic waste had become rampant enough that India’s environment ministry set up a special task force charged with curbing litter and promoting recycling. Video jockeys from popular music video channel, Channel [V], began urging their young viewers to stop using plastic bags.

Many executives at Western multinationals saw the building concerns about waste as having little to do with either them or the billions of plastic-wrapped products they were churning out. Much of what they sold was in small packages, especially single-use sachets.

Consumer goods companies in the West had occasionally used sachets to entice consumers to try new shampoos and laundry detergents. But it was in emerging markets like India that companies realised the full potential of the plastic sachet.

As a mainstream, everyday package, the sachet unlocked enormous multi-billion-dollar markets that had long been out of reach, promising a rush of new growth, courtesy of some of the world’s poorest people, just as sales in developed markets started to slow.

By the late 1980s, Unilever’s India subsidiary – Hindustan Lever – had begun packaging its shampoo brands Sunsilk and Clinic in sachets that held just enough for a single wash. ‘There was a realisation in Unilever decades ago that people on daily wages also have the same aspiration as people on monthly wages,’ says Vindi Banga, former chairman of Hindustan Lever. ‘That is the genesis of the single-use pack.’

Made from layers of plastic tightly bonded together, the sachet was the ultimate flexible package in terms of both price and functionality. It was light, robust, portable and weather-resistant.

At 2.5 inches by 1 inch, it could be discreetly tucked into a sari blouse or slipped into a pocket.

The sachet was also the cheapest product on the market, aimed at low-income Indians, many of whom earned daily wages and so didn’t have the luxury of buying large quantities of shampoo, oil or detergent. Government officials charged with tackling waste largely ignored it. Instead, they cracked down on more visible culprits like plastic bags, leaving consumer goods companies to keep selling billions of sachets each year, many of which were littered on streets and in waterways.

‘The worry, even if it was there, was quite low,’ Vivek Bali, P&G’s one-time haircare head for India, remembers. ‘We do know that many things in India get recycled.’ He pauses a moment, before adding: ‘But very frankly there was no strategy to get sachets back into a recycling process.’

(Extracted with permission from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri, Blink Publishing, an imprint of Bonnier UK)

Bookmarked

Take a look at what’s new in the business section of Amazon’s bookshelf

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna

Published: May 2025

The book is a commentary on the technologies sold as AI, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner.

H.I.T. Investing: Strong Returns Through High-Impact Investing Leveraging Technology

Mahesh Joshi

Published: September 2025

The book shares the journeys of seven of the world’s leading impact investors, highlighting how they’ve achieved financial returns.

Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy

Sangeet Paul Choudary

Published: June 2025

This is a guide to understanding who wins and who gets left behind when AI restacks the deck.

The Co-Intelligence Revolution: How Humans and AI together Can Create a New World

Venkat Ramaswamy and Krishnan Narayanan

Published: May 2025

The book illustrates co-intelligent enterprises across private, public and plural sectors unlocking new frontiers of value.