While sustainability is the hottest new buzzword that has found its way into branding campaigns, at the core of the concept is mindful consumption working in tandem with upcycling and recycling to expand a product's life cycle. A bunch of students from schools across Ahmedabad have been walking the sustainability talk by shunning the use of single-use plastics in their everyday lives while upcycling products. Pens are usually discarded after first use, regardless of whether their refills can be replaced or not.
An Ahmedabad-based social enterprise, World Around You Foundation (WAY), has been working with several schools to minimize the use of single-use plastic pens and ensure they are properly disposed of. Thanks to their efforts over the past five years, the use of single-use plastic pens has reduced considerably in several schools. "We began the campaign in 2013 by collaborating with schools in Ahmedabad.
Students were asked to collect used pens in a box. Six months after we approached a municipal school in Chandkheda for the project, we ended up collecting about 500kg of pens only to find that most of them were reusable," explained Wricha Johri, co-founder, WAY. "The concern about single-use plastic pens is that they're not recyclable because the grades of plastic used in the body, cap and ink refill are different.
That's when we began collecting and segregating the pen parts and giving them to the recycler. Meanwhile, we've also devised mechanisms in schools to promote t.
