Mumbai Woman Is Showing India How To Recycle Tetra Pak Cartons & Turn Them Into School Benches

Depending on whom you ask, Mumbai generates around an average 10,000 metric tonnes of waste every day, of which 73% is biodegradable food, vegetable and fruit waste which can easily be recycled. Only about 3% of the total waste is actually plastic, according to a BMC report.

And this is just one day of Mumbai's waste. Maharashtra generates the most waste of all states in India, and the country generates around 1.5 lakh metric tonnes of waste every day, according to a Feb 2019 estimate.

Quite a lot of this waste isn't 'treated' or recycled, which is causing acute environmental damage. But one woman is showing the way to others on how to recycle and treat waste at an individual level, and we can all learn a lot from her example.

Rur Greenlife

Hailing from Mumbai, Monisha Narke wanted to become an engineer while growing up, and it led her to earning an MS degree from Stanford University, USA. But deep down she always wanted to return to India and make a difference to the country.

"When I returned to Mumbai, the heaps and piles of waste all around bothered me to no end, and that's when I decided to start my green journey by tracking our waste, which took me all the way to Asia's biggest landfill in Deonar (Govandi), in Mumbai's eastern suburbs," recalls Monisha.

Trekking up the shockingly huge mountain of waste proved to be an eye opener and finalized Monisha's resolve. That's when she taught herself to compost her kitchen waste. Little baby steps before becoming a force of nature in the form of RUR (Are Your Reducing, Reusing, Recycling?), Monisha's NGO which has a green vision to create eco-conscious citizens who make their waste worthwhile. She started it as a volunteers group of fellow moms before registering RUR as a social movement.

"I am fully invested in the organization focusing on research and designing innovative solutions for decentralized waste management," Monisha says of her decade old green journey since founding RUR. "Initially we invested some of our own seed capital and now we are self-sustained by the sustainable products and services we offer."

Desk, chair, and garbage bins made of recycled Tetra Pak cartons // RUR Greenlife

Monisha's driven by aligning her social enterprise to help achieve nine of the seventeen UN-Sustainable Development Goals, vision 2030 -- especially focusing on maximizing recycling of waste and minimize dumping into landfills.

Her organization has designed a patented aerobic biocomposter, which can take daily food waste generated from a household and recycle it naturally without any electricity or microbial culture of any kind. She also collaborates with Tetra Pak's Go Green Initiative to educate citizens, setup recycling centres to collected discarded cartons in shopping centres, retail stores, schools and housing societies to build recycled products from the Tetra Pak cartons.

School kids collecting used Tetra Pak cartons // RUR Greenlife

"We have recycled over 3.2 million empty Tetra Pak cartons with support from Mumbaikars, and have donated more than 250 school desks to less privileged schools and children and 100 garden benches to enthusiastic consumers," Monisha says.

Across Mumbai and in some other cities like Lucknow, Chennai, and Bangalore, Monisha's organization helps recycle over 400 tonnes of biodegradable waste annually and mitigate 400kg of harmful carbon dioxide generated due to transportation of waste from source to landfills. Nothing goes to waste, as "the compost generated is used to remediate land and grow organic fruits and vegetables promoting good health and food security," explains Monisha.

Educating people to adopt green living practices at a household level is a big part of Monisha's focus -- stuff like segregation of waste at source by making citizens responsible for their own waste in a housing society, school or building complex. For Tetra Pak cartons recycling we set up spokes at schools, societies and corporate offices. "The waste is segregated in a three-bin approach as wet biodegradable, dry recyclable and trash hazardous waste. Not only educating home owners, but empowering housekeeping staff in the quest for safe and efficient recycling is paramount," she says.

RUR Bio Home Composter // Amazon.in

At this point, I wonder if there are any popular myths about recycling that Monisha likes to debunk. She points to a couple of important ones around plastic waste generation.

"The garbage bin liner that you use daily to bag your waste has gone through recycling over seven times and is the last product. It is extremely low value and there is no solution to recycle it further. They usually get disposed in the landfills, releasing toxins. The best solution is to avoid using them completely."

Monisha also stresses on the fact that, "Biocompostable liners available need to validated as some may not be fully compostable. For example, PET bottles and other thin plastics when recycled into yarn or used in road making, just transforms from seen waste to unseen waste as microplastics in the oceans. So care is needed, in these cases."

Rur Greenlife

When it comes to motivating citizens to participate in household green initiatives, Monisha runs various periodic awareness campaigns. Gamification is also used to generate rewards where people participate with gusto -- for e.g. through Go Green with Tetra Pak, any society, school or corporate office can register as a collection point for discarded cartons. The community that collects 2000 cartons is rewarded with a recycling bin made of used Tetra Pak cartons, and for 8,500 cartons they are rewarded with garden bench or school desk, Manisha claims.

In terms of success stories, Monisha points to Matoshree's Pearl, a high-rise residential society with 65 families supporting the green cause like no one else. They have nurtured and maintain a lush green terrace garden on the 23rd floor of the building, where bees and butterflies buzz around, and where children come to witness the integrated waste management project at work firsthand.

The Mahim high-rise in Mumbai's heart actively segregates waste at source, composting the wet waste, and the compost is used to grow local seasonal fruits and vegetables. The organic harvest is taken by the residents which motivates them to segregate at source even more. Dry waste from the residency is collected separately as paper, plastic, metal, e-waste, Tetra Pak cartons. E waste and Tetra Pak cartons are sent for safe recycling, while the paper, plastic and metal is auctioned monthly to local raddiwalas and the revenue generated is distributed partly amongst housekeeping staff driving the waste management project and partly to buy consumables such as sawdust, compostable bin liners, etc.

Bench made out of recycled Tetra Pak cartons

Finally, the compost generated is sold at Rs 30 per kilogram to the residents to generate revenue. The program has been operational since 2017 and is running effortlessly, says Monisha with a mix of pride and satisfaction.

If you thought that's it, Monisha's resting on her laurels and basking in her green movement's decade of success, you couldn't be more wrong. Her goal for 2021 is to expand her biocomposting and waste recycling projects to more parts of the country, growing from the current 75 to a total of 150 projects. "Researching and developing a range of new products to manage higher capacity input biowaste," is another item on Monisha's agenda. "We intend to develop the prototype and start the field trial in upcoming year."

We wish her all the best, hoping her eco-crusade spreads to more places from Mumbai, empowering lakhs of Indians to be more eco-sensitive and adopt simple recycling practices that go along way in reducing our impact on the environment.