Youth launch drive for plastic visarjan in hyderabad city

Hyderabad: The dependency on plastic in so intense that it seems very difficult for us to switch away completely from it. If you replace plastic items with alternatives one by one, you will make it happen one day.

With this very thought, Pragya Nagori (17) and Mridu Nagori (16) from the city have initiated a battle against single-use plastic items. They along with a team of volunteers from Oorja The Youth Energy has come up with alternatives to single use plastic items like brush, straw, pens, plastic bags and replace them with bamboo and steel items.

Speaking to The Hans India, Pragya said, "I believe in the quote 'charity begins at home' and that's why we have tried to avoid maximum use of plastic in our house and are spreading awareness among others through street plays and other ways.

If we notice carefully every other item in our house is made from plastic." She adds, "We have come up with a bunch of alternatives like bamboo brushes, bamboo straws and cleaners, cardboard pens (seedless and with seeds), newspaper pencils, paper pencils, steel straws, and cleaners and decorative items like seed books, wood decorative like a desk set, pen stand, lights, bowls which are made from fallen trees which will help to remove all the single-use plastic from our households." Pragya and her team also make cloth and paper bags made from recycled cloth and newspaper waste.

Each cloth bag is been made and shipped from their workshop in a small town named Dinhata in district Cooch Behar, West Bengal. The paper bags are made by specially abled children from a small village near Pune named Dhundh in Maharashtra.

The money that they receive from selling the paper bags is sent to the specially abled kids in Maharashtra as they are helping them to make paper bags. Each paper bag costs Rs 15 and so far they bought 5,000 bags made by the kids. So far, 1,200 bags have been sold. The bag is 14 inches (width) by 17 inches (length).

Each product costs within a range of Rs 15 to Rs 150 and the money they get from selling the eco-friendly products is used to carry out awareness programmes like cleanliness drives, no single-use plastic, my plastic upvaas, capital for making more products and for the cleaning the park situated in their colony.