Students show the civic way

Students show the civic way
The Times of India

Bangalore: A back-breaking pile of text and notebooks, pencils, lunch box... these are not the only things children carry to school nowadays. They also bring plastic waste from home to dump it on campus.

Accordingly, school managements have installed huge cartons where students can chuck anything, from polythene bags and milk pouches to PET bottles they fetch from home.

What’s the funda? Building durable roads, it seems. Heaps of hazardous waste accumulated in schools are used in laying roads by the K.K. Plastic Waste Management Limited (KKPWML). The city-based company has invented a new compound, polymerised bitumen, by mixing plastic waste.

Every Friday, 800 students of Delhi Public School (DPS), Yelahanka, carry anything plastic from their homes and chuck it in bins on campus. In the one-and-half months that the project was implemented, the school generated about three tons of plastic.

KKPWML, which bagged the BCC’s contract for supplying plastic to lay 430 km of city roads, buys plastic waste at the rate of Rs 6 a kilo.
“We have already sold waste worth Rs 10,000 to the company. The money generated will be used to run Anubhav Shiksha Kendra, a school for the under-privileged in the neighbourhood,’’ says DPS principal Sneh Preet Sial.

Last fortnight, mayor R. Narayanaswamy gave the green signal to a similar initiative at Bishop Cotton Girls School. “The project is an effort to make our students ecoconscious. After we implemented the scheme, children have learnt not to leave litter at home or on campus. The money earned by sale of plastic will be ploughed back to assist needy students,’’ asserts vice-principal Esther Pillai. Dayanada Sagar College now wants to follow suit.

Triggered by the response, even the BCC is planning to introduce a similar drive in its schools. “We are giving it serious thought, but we need manpower to handle it on a large scale. We have sought participation of private agencies to implement the scheme,’’ commissioner K. Jyothiramalingam says.