Lets all 'Skrap' to make our Events and Surroundings more Sustainable
September 20th , 2021 | Divya Ravichandran
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Environmental impact of our trash
I am an MBA and have worked in premiere organisations before moving on to the waste management space. The handicraft world and the urban market has always been of interest to me. My journey with zero waste and sustainability was sparked by a massive fire that broke out in Mumbai’s Deonar dumping ground in 2016. With the city engulfed in the smoke, my respiratory issues went into an overdrive. Forced to stay indoors that week, I started reading obsessively about how the city’s waste is managed and why it was on fire. I later visited the Deonar dumping ground to see the situation first hand, and it was a shocking experience. Seeing the environmental impact of our trash at that scale, meeting with informal waste workers and NGOs there to hear their stories, and learning about the impact of garbage on their health was eye opening for me. And that’s the day I decided it was unacceptable to contribute to the dumping ground and that I had to take more responsibility for my waste.
Sustainable practices and Zero Waste Solutions
I diligently segregated my waste, composted my food scraps and handed over my recyclable waste to the Dry Waste Collection Centres. I gradually stopped using disposable plastics and non-recyclable packaging. I now discard less than 100 grams of garbage from my home each year. What started as a personal journey towards zero waste, eventually led to the setting up of Skrap.
Link to a short NatGeo-Kommune video on why I founded Skrap is provided at the end.
Skrap is an environmental sustainability firm that helps organisations, events and individuals adopt sustainable practices and zero waste solutions.
Proper planning and Awareness
We help events become more sustainable and minimise their environmental impact. We believe that events and music festivals are unique platforms to engage with millennials and Generation Z to encourage positive action on environment issues, drive awareness and inspire change, via communications and interactions. Through extensive planning and implementation, we’ve helped large events transform their food courts into disposable-plastic-free zones, set up zero-waste water stations, and introduced waste reduction campaigns like Cup Reuse that encourages attendees to reuse their beverage cups for refills. We set up a comprehensive waste management infrastructure, which includes waste segregation points at the front end and waste sorting and responsible disposal at the backend. Our team of Trash Talk volunteers onground help build excitement and participation for waste segregation and recycling.
We ensure that all waste generated is thoroughly sorted by category, quantified and sustainably disposed of at facilities like biogas plants, composting sites, recycling units and NGOs, thereby diverting over 85% of this waste from landfills.
Behavioural change towards our waste
More recently, we've also helped film and television shoots go Zero Waste by creating customised waste management plans and identifying avenues for waste reduction.
Our Zero Waste Office projects help build awareness around sustainability through employee engagement, infrastructure setup and positive behaviour change. We set up a comprehensive management infrastructure and complement it with awareness sessions and engagement activities like workshops, campaigns, and communications.
We also conduct in person and virtual workshops that are designed to inspire positive climate action and make it easier for individuals to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. Our workshops are carefully curated to be engaging, positive, and solution-oriented.
We want to help business and their events to change towards Zero-Waste and lead a change in behavioural pattern for sustainable solutions.
You can know more about Divya journey Click here or about Skrap Click here
Have you listened our Ep-6 of Waste Unwrap yet?
Click here to read detail episode notes or watch other episodes
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