‘Be the change you want to see,’ is a worn-out cliché, but there are many amongst us who work on these very lines. Ashish Garg of Kewal Vihar Dehradun has been working on innovative ways of ensuring a greener, better tomorrow. Be it, saving rain water through a basic water–harvesting plant at home or making manure from leaf mould or simply managing waste, by segregation and recycling bio-degradable waste at home.
Motivated with the idea of minimum waste, Ashish Garg keeps coming up with simple ideas which make a huge difference, “Ban of single use plastic has done away with most of the plastic that we would bring back from the market. But what concerned me was the daily milk pouches that made its way into our kitchen every morning.”
Which brought about the idea of how after proper rinsing and drying these milk- pouches, they could be inserted into empty plastic bottles, compacted tightly with the help of a rod or wooden stick to accommodate as much as one could. “Infact any other transparent plastic waste can also go into the bottle, I could squeeze almost 80 such wrappers into one bottle alone, Ashish tells us.
The advantage. Bottle has reduced plastic waste by volume significantly and acts as a solid brick, that post a touch of paint, can be used as a colourful hedge around trees or flower beds, which automatically reduces waste that ends up in land fills. Or if you want, you could collect these bottles and send them off to the Institute of Indian Petroleum in Dehradun, for their diesel plant, as an olefin product.
Ashish Garg sums it up, “I am working on the lines of: ‘want-not, waste-not,‘ this is a very basic, doable idea. The motive behind it is to motivate and unite people for a cause so that we can minimise plastic waste which unfortunately finds its way to landfills.”
