New Delhi, April 4 -- In January 2025, 75,000 people watched the music group Coldplay perform in Mumbai and left behind more than 9,000 kilogrammes of waste: Mostly plastic bottles and food wrappers. While the city had devised a detailed action plan - strategically placed bins and multiple vehicles to collect trash during the concert - these efforts did not stave off the nine tonnes.

This generated criticism towards elite consumption behaviour: One man's entertainment, another's drudgery. While fair and perhaps necessary, this argument risks obscuring a dirtier truth: Concert-goers did not start the waste problem. Even before Coldplay's hymns reached our shores, various stakeholders - including municipal authorities - had produced a colo...