Environment

“What would happen if the city had to pay to receive rainfall?” The trio from Gurugram brainstormed over this question while stuck in traffic due to heavy rains. Today, they are helping Siemens, Tata, and the governments of Delhi and Uttarakhand harvest rain by using recycled plastic!

"Our tiles are anti-static, antimicrobial and anti-bacterial. They can also sustain heat up to 140°C and cold up to -25°C. Moreover, damaged tiles can be reused to manufacture new ones."

"During the winters, most families here create bonfires out of plastic waste and huddle in front of it to beat the cold. We wanted to change that and so started to encourage our students to bring plastic waste as school fees."

Not only has this simple initiative saved 1.4 lakh CO2 emissions, it has also increased the income of rag pickers by 25 per cent - a win-win for the planet as well as its people!

Did you know Bokashi is quite an efficient way to deal with your kitchen waste, including dairy and meat scraps? It is also less smellier than vermicomposting — a feature smartly used by these citizens!

In many households across India, grandmothers still follow this practice of drying certain leaves and flowers and making a paste from it. If my nonagenarian grandmother had her way, she would still be making her own shampoo powder.

"I was absolutely devastated and shocked by what I saw. Several elephants had been blinded, many had raw bleeding wounds on their ankles, and almost all of them had enormous tumours on their hips. And yet they were being forced to parade beneath the scorching sun, deprived of a proper home, food, and water.”

The programme goes much beyond creating a robust curriculum, by providing a holistic and innovative prelude to sustainability education.

“There is a huge knowledge system that exists in our culture. In fact, local communities make sustainable homes with better facilities than what the contractor can provide them! So we sit down with them and take tradition forward."

Keeping it simple but not discounting on the fun factor at all, Sonal Gawde and Shreyes Menon have proved it that any occasion can be celebrated without generating mounds of waste—be it food or non-biodegradable elements!