• Only 38% of municipal solid waste collected daily
• Over 6,000 tonnes left in dumpsites and waterways each day
• Just 3–4% of plastic waste formally recycled
• E-waste recovery remains largely in informal hands
• CEA moves towards tougher fines and producer responsibility rules
• Weak enforcement, not lack of laws, is the real problem, experts say

Every day, Sri Lanka generates roughly 9,811 metric tonnes of municipal solid waste. Local Government authorities manage to collect just 3,767 tonnes of it – about 38%. 

The remainder, more than 6,000 tonnes a day, is left to accumulate in some 349 open dumpsites and waterway systems across the island, according to assessments compiled by the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) and the Basel Convention Secretariat. 

Of the plastic waste generated nationally, research shows, only 3–4% is ever formally recycled into secondary products.

The scale of the problem

Sri Lanka’s plastic consumption has expanded rapidly even as its capacity to manage the resulting waste has failed to keep pace. 

A 2021 study by K. Samarasinghe, S. Pawan Kumar, and C. Visvanathan, published in Environmental Quality Management, used Material Flow Analysis to show that only a small fraction of the plastic waste generated annually is systematically recycled.

Official data puts a finer point on the crisis. The total estimated municipal plastic waste generation in Sri Lanka is 249,037 tonnes annually, according to a 2024 Ministry of Environment report. From this, approximately 171,561 tonnes, which is about 69% of plastic waste generated in Sri Lanka each year, remains completely unmanaged, either open-burnt, illegally buried, or lost to river basins and the ocean.  

It was this kind of leakage that saw Sri Lanka identified, in the foundational global marine plastics study by Jambeck et al. (2015), as one of the world’s top contributors of mismanaged plastic waste entering the sea.

The country does have a plastic reprocessing sector. Based on industry surveys by Gunarathne et al. (2019) and CEA registry figures, Sri Lanka has between 100 and 140 registered plastic reprocessing centres, alongside hundreds of informal scrap yards, with a technical processing capacity estimated at nearly 140,000 MT a year. 

However, actual output runs well below that capacity, hampered by an inconsistent supply of clean, pre-sorted waste. Rigid plastics – High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE), and Polypropylene (PP) – are the most collected and reprocessed materials, converted locally into buckets, flower pots, and electrical conduit pipes. 

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) tells a similarly uneven story: of the roughly 1,250 MT of PET bottles consumed monthly, CEA data shows only about 250 MT, or 20%, are recovered. What is recovered is processed by firms such as Eco Spindles into synthetic monofilaments for industrial brushes, or exported as crushed PET flakes.

Waste-to-energy: Promise capped by chemistry

Sri Lanka’s sole utility-scale waste-to-energy plant, operated by Western Power Company Ltd., sits in Kerawalapitiya. According to Western Province Waste Management Authority data, it processes 600–700 MT of municipal solid waste daily, delivering 10–11.5 MW to the national grid and having repurposed more than 815,000 MT of trash to date.

Speaking to The Sunday Morning, CEA Waste Management Division Deputy Director General Shyamani Periyapperuma said that the plant’s daily capacity was closer to 750 tonnes, adding that two further waste-to-energy projects were planned for the Western Province, though neither was yet operational. Outside the Western Province, she said, waste volumes were too low to justify standalone plants. 

“In other provinces, the volume of waste generated is much lower, so a waste-to-energy model might need to be planned collectively for two or three local authorities,” she said, adding that all provincial and local authorities had been instructed to develop their own waste management master plans.

Expanding the technology further, however, runs into a basic chemistry problem. Research by Kumarasiri and Dissanayake (2020), applying a Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTEL) framework to waste-to-energy implementation barriers, found that Sri Lanka’s unsegregated waste carries an organic fraction exceeding 60% and high moisture content, both of which drastically reduce the calorific value needed for efficient thermal power generation and drive up operational costs.

The e-waste drain

Electronic waste presents a different kind of failure – one of value lost rather than simply mismanaged. 

The CEA projects the country’s annual e-waste generation will rise to around 43,000 MT by 2030. Of that, formal collection through CEA-licensed entities such as Insee Ecocycle and Eco Spindles accounts for less than 10%. 

The remainder leaks into the informal scrap sector, where unsafe open-burning is routinely used to recover copper and precious metals, releasing toxic dioxins, furans, and heavy metals into surrounding soil and groundwater.

Ceylon Waste Management Ltd. Managing Director Sudesh Nandasiri, speaking to The Sunday Morning, said that the country was compounding this loss by continuing to export raw circuit boards rather than processing them domestically. 

His company operates an e-waste refinery in Katunayake that claims it is capable of processing 100% of Sri Lanka’s electronic waste locally, using technology comparable to facilities in Japan and South Korea. 

“While other traders export circuit boards as raw materials, we perform advanced local refining to extract high-value precious metals like copper, gold, silver, and palladium to produce finished gold coins and other materials for export,” Nandasiri said. “If raw exports yield a baseline value of 100, we generate nine times that value in foreign currency through our local refinery,” he claimed.

He contended that continuing to export raw e-waste while a domestic processing facility existed breached the Basel Convention, which governs the transboundary movement of hazardous waste and favours domestic disposal where capacity allows. 

Nandasiri has raised the matter with the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, calling for a limitation on raw e-waste scrap exports similar to existing restrictions on copper and aluminium scrap.

“The Minister of Industry requested a report and we hope to submit it on Friday (21),” Nandasiri said.

Fines, registration and a roadmap still on paper

The CEA is now moving to overhaul the penalty structure that has long undercut enforcement. Under the previous law, Periyapperuma said, a raid on illegal polythene use carried a fine of just Rs. 100,000 – cheap enough that offenders would pay it and resume operations elsewhere. 

“This has been completely overhauled under the new act, with the fine being increased from Rs. 100,000 to Rs. 1 million,” she said. “We believe this significant increase will effectively deter repeat offenders.” 

Alongside the fines, the CEA is building a national Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework requiring manufacturers, producers, brand owners, and importers to register. 

“The legal provision is now in place, allowing us to formulate these regulations,” Periyapperuma said. “We have drafted the regulations and are ready to submit them to the Legal Draftsman. Once approved and officially gazetted, we will begin implementation.” 

She said that the rollout would begin with PET bottles before expanding to e-waste and other plastic categories, supported by an implementation manual, an awareness campaign, and an online registration portal. The CEA has also signed a memorandum of understanding with Dialog Axiata allowing the public to drop off designated recyclable items at Dialog outlets.

Separately, Ceylon Waste Management has built a digital EPR platform – operated through an affiliated entity, Extended Producer Responsibility Ltd. – that assigns a unique QR code to individual products so their disposal can be traced back to source. 

“The uniqueness of this platform is that it handles multi-segments,” Nandasiri said. “It is not restricted to plastics; it can handle batteries, e-waste, medical waste, and waste oil.” 

Control of the platform’s data, he said, was shared with State bodies including the CEA, the Ministry of Environment, Customs, and the Auditor General’s Department, in order to prevent it being monopolised by private interests. The platform is live and companies are registering, but Nandasiri said that the Government had yet to gazette the operational regulations needed to make it enforceable.

Laws are not the problem

According to senior environmental lawyer Dr. Ravindranath Dabare, Sri Lanka’s legal architecture for waste management is already extensive: the National Environmental Act, Municipal Councils Ordinance, Urban Councils Ordinance, Pradeshiya Sabhas Act, Police Ordinance, and Gazette Extraordinary No.1534/18 of 2008, which governs the licensing of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste disposal. 

The Supreme Court has also recognised a right to a healthy and disease-free environment as a fundamental right, one that binds State institutions, corporations, and municipal officials.

Yet recycling rates remain critically low, and Dr. Dabare is unambiguous about why.

“It is not a matter of loopholes; the laws are simply not being properly implemented,” he told The Sunday Morning. “Once licences are issued, there is no proper follow-up to check whether the licence conditions are actually being complied with.” 

The consequences of that gap are visible in the plastic and polythene ban that has technically been in force since 2017. 

“The plastic ban is only active in supermarkets, which was achieved through a court case the Centre for Environmental Justice filed,” Dr. Dabare said. “In other ordinary shops, shopping bags are still handed out freely just like before.” The environmental fund meant to support conservation efforts under this framework, he added, was yet to be established.

The informal backbone

For all the emphasis on formal infrastructure, Nandasiri insists the system already depends on a workforce it has never formally recognised: an estimated 300,000 informal waste collectors who move through every part of the country gathering everything from coconut shells to scrap iron. 

“None of us can replicate the service they perform,” he said, citing a 2004 study by the Japan International Cooperation Agency that warned policymakers against disrupting this segment of the economy. 

He acknowledged that, without training, informal collectors sometimes caused localised pollution – dumping the polyurethane foam from a dismantled refrigerator, for instance, because they had no way to process it – but argued that the solution was integration, not exclusion. 

“We must increase their awareness, improve their facilities, and licence them so their operations can be regulated,” he said. “They are the actual people cleaning up our environment.” 

Whether Sri Lanka’s new fines, its draft EPR regulations, and its digital traceability platforms translate into a functioning recycling economy will depend on the same element Dr. Dabare identified as the system’s chronic weakness: follow-through. The laws, largely, already exist. What has been missing, year after year, is enforcement.