An Assam school has been quietly doing its part in environmental conservation for almost a decade now.
Talks about being environmentally conscious and not adding to the already concerning amount of pollution and trash the world is facing are, sadly, a very recent development.
This is despite the fact that experts and researchers have been stressing the rising environmental concerns for more than a couple of decades now.
However, it is important to acknowledge the sectors and groups that have been doing something interesting and innovative that would benefit the environment at the same time.
The Akshar Forum School in Assam has come into the limelight once more for this.
What Is This School?
The school is called Akshar Forum School, located in Pamohi, a village on the outskirts of Guwahati in Assam. The school was founded by Parmita Sarma, a social work graduate, and her husband, Mazin Mukhtar, upon their return to India from New York in 2016.
Until 2019, the school had actually been fully free. The funding came from various initiatives the couple ran, including one about recycling, which they introduced upon seeing the excessive use of plastic in Assam.
Parmita Sarma said, “The use of plastics is rampant across Assam.”
Sarma also told Better India, “I still remember how our classrooms would be filled with toxic fumes every time someone in the nearby areas would burn plastics,” adding, “Here it was a norm to burn waste plastic to keep warm. We wanted to change that, and so started to encourage our students to bring their plastic waste as school fees.”
Mr Priyongsu Borthakur, vice-president of Akshar, told Homegrown that “the idea is to train students in recognising how to live an eco-friendly life.”
However, when a recycling scheme failed to get much participation, the founders decided to introduce the ‘plastic fee’.
Borthakur explained that “the entire recycling program is carried out by the students, from start to finish”, with students going from house to house collecting plastic waste and then segregating and repurposing it at the school.
Mukhtar explained that “When we asked the parents to send their household plastic with their children on the school bus, almost none of them complied. They preferred to burn their plastic at home. So my wife told them we would start charging fees. Fees which they could pay in cash, or in plastic waste from their homes.”
The aim of the school is to help underprivileged children ‘earn a livelihood by being responsible to the government.’
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In a community that preferred to send its kids to work in order to help the family financially, this option between money and plastic waste seems to have actually worked in favour of the students, with many families choosing the latter. The numbers speak for themselves: the school started with just 20 students and now has roughly 110 enrolled.
The way this system works is that each student is expected to bring in a set quota of dry plastic waste every week; reports place the requirement at around 10 to 20 plastic items per household, collected from their own homes and neighbourhoods.
The plastic is collected by teachers at the school, after which the students, along with the staff, sort through it.
Some of it is set aside for their “Eco-bricks”, where the waste is packed into empty bottles and then compressed into solid, dense blocks used in the very infrastructure of the school. These are used for classroom walls, campus pathways, toilets, and more.
The rest of the plastic is sold to recyclers, helping create a small revenue stream that goes towards the upkeep of the school and paying its faculty.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Firstpost, NDTV, Time Magazine
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This post is tagged under: Assam School, Assam school plastic free, Assam school plastic free model, Assam school fees, Assam school plastic waste fee, Assam akshar school, plastic waste, plastic waste india, pollution, environment, recycling
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