https://reasonstobecheerful.world/india-school-fees-plastic-bags/
"On a misty Thursday morning in the village of Pamohi in the northeast Indian
state of Assam, children walk to school carrying two bags. One holds their
books; the other contains 25 cleaned and sorted plastic bags and bottles. For
these students, the latter is currency — their school, the Akshar Forum, a
100-student institution established in 2016, accepts plastic as tuition fees.
When the kids arrive at school, they queue patiently, chattering among
themselves as they wait their turn to deposit their weekly “fees.”
“I wonder why, across Pamohi, people still don’t segregate their waste,”
15-year-old Piyush Kalita muses. “If only we figured out how to dispose of
plastic properly, life would be very different.”
Kalita is right. Assam currently faces a huge plastic waste disposal problem.
Its capital, Guwahati, produces 500 metric tons of waste every day, of which
less than a third is processed. The rest suppurates in landfills, leaching
toxins and microplastics into the environment — or worse, is burned by those
with few other options to generate warmth during the harsh winters.
Parmita Sarma, who co-founded Akshar Forum in 2016 with Mazin Mukhtar, an
aeronautics engineer who gave up his job to work with disadvantaged families in
the U.S. before returning to India, came up with a solution to the region’s
plastic crisis: “Instead of waiving the tuition fee in our school, we decided
to take it in the form of plastic waste,” she says.
The world over, there are projects that assign value to plastic, creating a
financial incentive for communities to collect and keep the material out of the
environment. Social enterprise Plastic Bank, which launched in Haiti and now
also has branches across Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand
and Cameroon, incentivizes communities to collect plastic from
ecologically-fragile zones in return for tokens that can be cashed in for money
or food. They then sell recycled plastic to be used in packaging. New
Jersey-based recycling business Terracycle helps schools raise funds by getting
students to collect and recycle waste. And in Lagos, Nigeria, Morit
International School accepts plastic bottles in lieu of tuition fees from
underprivileged students."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
