International Catering Waste — Animal & Plant Quarantine Control (RULE_AQCS_ICW)

Reference only — not legal advice. This page is EarthReheal WasteLedger's plain-language interpretation of the rule, written to help organisations understand what may apply to them. It can be incomplete or inaccurate. Always read the official gazette notification or statute, and confirm with your regulator or a qualified adviser, before relying on it for compliance decisions.

Quick Summary

Waste offloaded from an international aircraft cannot join the airport's ordinary wet/dry waste stream. Meat, milk and other livestock products, and plant material, served on inbound international flights are treated as quarantine-controlled material — a biosecurity control against exotic livestock and plant disease entering India. In practice that means: segregate at the point of offload, hold in dedicated identified bins, and dispose by incineration (or another approved treatment that renders the material biologically inactive) through a contractor working under Animal Quarantine and Certification Services (AQCS) supervision, with a manifest for every consignment.

Domestic-flight catering waste is ordinary waste and follows SWM Rules 2026. The line between the two runs through the terminal, which is why the segregation has to start airside and not at the waste yard.

What This Rule Is

Full name: There is no single instrument called "the ICW rule". The control is assembled from:

the Livestock Importation Act, 1898 (as amended), under which AQCS operates import controls on livestock and livestock products;
the Plant Quarantine (Regulation of Import into India) Order, 2003, issued under the Destructive Insects and Pests Act, 1914, for plant material;
station-level standing orders / SOPs issued by the AQCS and Plant Quarantine stations at each port of entry, which carry the operational detail.

Issuing / administering authorities: Animal Quarantine and Certification Services (AQCS), Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairying, Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying; the Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine & Storage for plant material; and the SPCB/PCC for the consent covering the incinerator itself.

Citation precision warning. The statutory backbone above is solid, but the operative day-to-day requirements — bin specification, holding times, manifest format, approved treatment methods — live in AQCS station standing orders that are not uniformly published, vary by port of entry, and are revised without gazette notification. Do not quote a clause number to a customer. Confirm the current SOP with the AQCS station at that specific airport.

Legal basis: import-control statutes, not environmental ones. This is why an airport can be fully SWM-compliant and still be in breach: the failure mode is quarantine, not pollution.

Who This Applies To

Applies to: airport operators handling international arrivals, and — jointly — the ground-handling agents and flight-catering units that physically move the waste. Responsibility is usually contractual between them and regulatory on the operator, so the contract needs to name who holds the manifest.

Does not apply to: purely domestic terminals and domestic-only airports. If an airport has no international arrivals, this rule is off — which is why WasteLedger gates it behind the hasInternationalTerminal condition rather than applying it to every airport.

Watch the mixed-terminal case: where domestic and international arrivals share a terminal, baggage hall or waste yard, the segregation has to be physical and visible. A shared compactor is the single most common way this control fails.

What Counts as International Catering Waste

Galley waste returned from an inbound international aircraft, including:

food and beverages, part-consumed and untouched alike;
items that have been in contact with meat or milk;
disposable food-service items from those carts;
plant material (fruit, vegetables, flowers, packing straw).

Notably, food waste, disposable food-service items and items in contact with milk are specifically excluded from what may be recycled — so the recycling targets an airport reports against cannot count this stream.

Compliance Requirements — What You Actually Have to Do

#	Obligation	Cadence	Evidence in WasteLedger
1	Dedicated, labelled ICW bins and a segregated holding area	Once, kept current	`ICW_SEGREGATED_STORAGE_PHOTO`
2	Agreement with an AQCS-approved incineration/disposal contractor, plus that incinerator's SPCB consent	Once, kept current	`ICW_AUTHORISED_DISPOSAL_AGREEMENT`
3	Manifest for every offload consignment — date, flight reference, weight, disposal method	Per consignment	`ICW_DISPOSAL_MANIFEST`

The manifest is the whole control. Weight per movement, disposal method and the contractor's certification reference are what a quarantine inspection asks for, and they are what an operator most often cannot produce.

Penalties & Enforcement

Quarantine action: seizure and supervised destruction of the consignment; directions to the operator and contractor.
Prosecution under the Livestock Importation Act, 1898 / Destructive Insects and Pests Act, 1914 route for a breach of import control.
Operational, and the one that actually bites: the international terminal depends on the quarantine clearance at that station. A repeated ICW failure puts that clearance — and therefore international operations — in play. This is a far larger exposure than the fine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can we compost international catering waste on site? No. On-site organic processing is the SWM-preferred route for your ordinary wet waste and is exactly what the quarantine control is designed to prevent for this stream. Composting it would defeat the biosecurity purpose.

Our caterer says they handle it. Is that enough? Contractually maybe; regulatorily, get the manifests. The operator is the one holding the aerodrome and quarantine relationship. Name the manifest-holder in the contract and collect the records monthly.

Does this reduce our SWM-reported tonnage? It should move it, not hide it. ICW leaves on a separate chain to an incinerator, so it is not part of the wet-waste processing figure — but it still needs to reconcile in the airport's total waste accounting. Report it as its own stream.

*What about waste from international departures?* The control targets material landed from outside India. Waste generated airside from a departing flight's catering loaded in India is ordinary waste. Where carts turn round without a clean break, treat the whole cart as controlled — that is the conservative and usual practice.

Government / Official Sources

Animal Quarantine and Certification Services (AQCS), India: https://aqcsindia.gov.in
AQCS — import/export procedures: https://aqcsindia.gov.in/Home/ImportExportProcedures
Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine & Storage: https://ppqs.gov.in
Livestock Importation Act, 1898 and Destructive Insects and Pests Act, 1914 — India Code: https://www.indiacode.nic.in

Related Rules

RULE_SWM_2026 — governs everything this rule carves out; the two streams must be visibly separate from the point of offload.
RULE_AIRCRAFT_RULES_91 — ICW sitting in an open or shared bin is precisely the bird attractant Rule 91 prohibits, so a segregation failure here usually creates a second breach there.
RULE_FSSAI — the flight-kitchen and terminal F&B licensing side of the same operation; separate obligation, frequently the same contractor.

Additional Reference Content

Secondary explainers and industry material — useful context only; prefer the AQCS station SOP.

Looking for which rules apply to your organisation type? See the interactive coverage picker on the compliance coverage page.