Watch your waste

Auroville Today: How did you get interested in waste?

Chandrah: My interest in waste began in 2009 when a few of us young Aurovilians started Soma Waste Management. We decided to study Auroville’s management of waste. Our goal was to replicate Auroville’s waste management system in one of the surrounding rural villages. We soon realised, however, that though our waste management was very advanced in the global context – our recycling rates were high and organic waste was removed and converted into compost fairly efficiently – the Eco Service (that manages Auroville’s waste) was still facing several challenges in further separating the types of waste that were coming in. Evidently, separation of waste at the community level in Auroville still left much to be desired.

This led us to conduct a community-wide survey within Auroville to understand our attitudes to waste and assess our levels of awareness. The questions we were asking were: Do you know where your waste goes? How many categories do you separate your waste into at home? What infrastructure for waste management do we have in place in restaurants, units and health clinics?

What were your findings from this survey?

Chandrah: We realised that many improvements were possible in Auroville. We did not know, for example, how to deal with medical waste. We did some research on safe biomedical waste handling and disposal and helped the clinics in Auroville manage this complex type of waste.

Our biggest challenge, we realised, was one of perception. We urgently needed to get more people thinking about and involved with waste. Auroville’s waste composition had changed dramatically between the early nineties and the end of the decade. By 2009, many more plastics were ending up in the waste stream.

Ribhu: As a result of this survey, we decided to launch a big awareness campaign, the litter-free campaign, about the issue of waste in the community. Our goal was to reach at least 50 percent of the community, targeting different age groups through education programmes, exhibitions, clean-ups and events.

How did your work with schools start?

Ribhu: We reached out to over 1250 children in 14 Auroville and outreach schools. It was here that we realised the power of the youngest people in our community. The children between 6-15 were responsive, passionate and the quickest to change habits and shift collective behaviour in their homes. They were stopping their parents on the streets to pick up floating plastic bags. They were challenging their parents’ shopping habits. It became obvious to us that if we wanted to keep waste on the map and continue to raise awareness, education was the way forward.

Garbology 101 was the first tool kit you created for raising awareness about waste in schools. Tell us about how and why you created it.

Chandrah: In 2011 we decided to create an educational toolkit for schools.The idea was to create an interactive and engaging set of activities for children that would present a holistic perspective with multiple lenses through which the issue of waste could be understood. Several months of background work went into creating this. We researched not only a range of existing curricula on waste, recycling and environment, but also child development. For example, learning styles and capacities, skills and interests at different phases of development.

Providing a broad range of activities that could be used for a diverse profile of students was very important for us. We sought inputs from teachers from a range of schools to understand their vision of a curriculum, preferences with regards to materials and presentation, and the resources their students use and have access to. The result was a collection of 101 activities that could be offered to children between the ages of 6-15 years. Whether in Auroville or in the outreach schools, teachers could select and tailor a curriculum to best suit the needs and capacities of their students.

How is Garbology 101 different from other existing curricula on waste?

Chandrah: Many of the existing educational programmes on waste management focus on recycling and safe disposal of waste. We found it important to address waste as a system and look at other aspects, such as the players in the system, the issue of natural resources and consumerism. Moreover, we think it’s crucial to stress the leading waste management model in which avoidance and reduction of consumption are the most effective strategies to combat waste.

What was the impetus to create Garbology Lite?

Maya: Garbology Lite was the result of a shift in focus from quantity to quality. We realised that ensuring an excellent qualitative educational experience was crucial if we wanted to inspire change in attitude and behaviour towards waste. Encouraged and guided by our mentor, Gerald, who is a professional in the field of social communication and education, we selected 9 of the 101 activities to see how we could improve them.

To accomplish this, we took each of these activities to several different classrooms and documented how teachers used the material and how children responded. In this way, we received instant feedback about what worked and what didn’t: whether the content was easy to access and implement for teachers, which sections were prone to misunderstandings, what inspired the children’s curiosity, and whether the intended message landed powerfully with them.

Ribhu: Interestingly, often teachers would radically improve the experience of an activity by introducing their own strategies or ideas. We would take this information from them, apply it to our structure and test it again. This approach of participatory research action, where teachers and students have a high level of structured input into our lesson plans, has become the backbone of our methodology. It has enabled us to continually refine the material, making it more engaging and powerful each time.

What aspects of waste do the activities in Garbology Lite cover?

Maya: We have activities that range across different aspects of waste, from an introduction to waste, learning how to separate waste, discovering how long waste lasts in our environment, to learning about different batteries, tackling packaging. The programme also includes a school level litter clean up. We have 9 activities that are currently online and we are looking at developing more from the Garbology 101 toolkit in the future.

You have chosen to make Garbology Lite accessible to teachers on the net.

Ribhu: Yes, Garbology Lite is available to teachers and institutions free of cost. The print version (Garbology 101) was too expensive and limited the use of the programme to about 50 elite schools in India. Online, it still has a participatory action framework. You can download one of the nine activities for free to begin with. And it’s only when you fill in the feedback form that we unlock the rest of the activities. The feedback we receive gets plugged back in, constantly improving the activities. The idea is to create a relationship with teachers who are passionate about it and make them partners and co-creators in an ongoing feedback loop.

This has meant that we changed our model from a sales-based organisation that creates content and sells it, to a research based organisation that, using Auroville’s scale and familiarity to our advantage, can carry out detailed and sustained research on the impact of such educational models on attitudes and behaviour.

How do you track the impact of these curricula in schools?

Chandrah: We keep receiving information from teachers about the students’ initiatives, like convincing their parents to buy them a stainless steel bottle in place of a plastic one, or installing garbage bins in schools. But measuring specific behaviour change over time is a nut we’re constantly trying to crack.

It is for this reason that in developing “kNOw PLASTICS”, an education programme focussing exclusively on plastics, we chose to design the evaluation first. Guided by peer reviewed science across various disciplines, we honed in on specific behaviours that help solve plastic pollution. We focused on two key areas: unsafe plastics that are made with chemicals that are bad for us, animals and the environment, and one-time use plastics such as a plastic bag, a bottle and a straw. These were the types of disposable items we wanted the children to avoid. So we devised questions and lesson plans to reinforce these behaviours. We also tried to connect the children’s behaviour to that of the parents and their families.

Disposable plastics are one of the biggest culprits, aren’t they?

Ribhu: Single use plastics, such as resin code #4 LDPE are used to make most plastic bags. They are bad for several reasons and across different disciplines. Marine biologists tell us that Sea Turtles eat them because they look like jelly fish in the ocean, they block drains and increase the chance of flooding, and they’re so lightweight that there is no financial incentive to collect them for recycling. They’re so cheap and convenient we’re using a trillion of them each year and 97% of them never get recycled. Through fun games and experiential learning, we teach children the latest science. We don’t sugar-coat the situation but we build experiences that are empowering and show them that they can indeed be part of the solution rather than the plastic pollution.

How does a child learn to change their behaviour regarding plastics?

Ribhu: We identify issues that are intimately connected to the daily life and environment of the child. In kNOw PLASTICS, we teach children about resin codes. This is the ‘secret’ language for understanding plastics and how safe, questionable or unsafe they are. This makes children curious. It also gives them agency. A child can flip over her plastic water bottle, figure out if it’s a good or bad plastic, and empowered with this knowledge, make conscious decisions about what she uses! When we find something that is so close and relevant to the life of a child, we’ve found a powerful key to inspire behavioural change.

Around these comprehensive learning activities we have, together with Auroville teachers and students, designed powerful experiences to carry this learning into the home. For example, one take-home activity asks each child to bring one plastic item with an unsafe resin code from his home. He then takes it back home with a handout to show his parents, thus increasing the likelihood that the new awareness reaches the family and behavioural change will follow.

Maya: One of the ways to make learning fun and engaging for children in the kNOw PLASTICS educational programme is a memory game. From our extensive research on plastics we narrowed down the key messages to convey to children about plastics. Alongside information about the impacts of plastics, their lifecycle, good/bad practices regarding plastics and the problem of disposables, children explore usable, sustainable alternatives to these disposable plastic items. One take-home activity requires them to bring one of these single-use plastic items from their favourite restaurant, be it a straw, a cup or cutlery. Then they look for reusable alternatives so that they can continue to eat the food they enjoy while avoiding the use of detrimental plastics.

Chandrah: We believe that the key is to empower students by providing information that is accurate but not overwhelming, while offering solutions that they can implement in their own life. That’s what we’ve improved on in Garbology Lite and kNOw PLASTICS. We have learned to think from the children’s perspective, linking it to their life and home. When they can relate what they learn to their own individual experiences, it touches them and they want to exercise choice.

Our goal is to empower children to believe that they can change at the individual level and that they have the ability to initiate change in their family, school, the larger community and join bigger movements. At the end of the day, we want policy change and children need to know that they have the agency to affect that change.

In how many schools are these curricula being used?

Chandrah: In November last year we trained 210 government school teachers for Garbology Lite in Rajapalayam and Cuddalore and 96 teachers for kNOw PLASTICS in Trichy. This is in partnership with the School Education Department of the Tamil Nadu Government. Our target is to reach a minimum of 60 students per school in this academic year.

How have you been funding this work?

We have received support from Stichting de Zaaier, a Dutch foundation, and the American Foundation of World Education. Both of them have supported us through all our stages of working and reworking. SAIIER supported Garbology Lite and our work to develop the kNOw PLASTICS educational programme. And RAMCO, a cement company, in whose schools we have been running our programmes since 2012, has helped us build connections with the Tamil Nadu State Government and education departments.

You are currently working on preparing content for the Tamil Nadu School Board. This must be a dream come true!

Ribhu: Yes, it is! When the Tamil Nadu government installed a ban on one-time use/throwaway plastics, they asked us to write content on waste for their curriculum! We’ve been working on the subject for a long time and it’s easy for us to adapt it for their use. We’ve written two chapters so far – one on waste in general for class 6 and one on chemistry for class 9. This content will reach 1.5 million students in each grade in English and Tamil from January 2019 on. We couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity! We look forward to establishing more partnerships and sharing the research and consciousness developed in Auroville with classrooms around the world. Our plan is to do this until the concept of waste no longer exists!

For more information visit Wastelessindia.org