Recycling initiative gains greater surface area in Chennai – The Hindu

Anything that is seen will be seen again and again and yet again: sometimes only in the mind, and sometimes as a concrete reality. Call it a positive case of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, resident groups are ‘seeing’ eWaste more often; and they are also seeing the necessity of carefully seeing these dangerous discards all the way to the place from where they would not make an insidious comeback. The fact that eWaste requires careful handling meant that it had been persistently kept as a footnote in recycling initiatives promoted by residents’ groups in Chennai. Over the last three years, the scene has shifted with a handful of groups — Residents of Kasturbanagar Association (ROKA) being a prominent one among them — beginning to see eWaste as a category deserving focussed attention.

This residents’ group from the neighbourhood of Kasturba Nagar has organised five eWaste drives in three years, with the fifth one in the offing (February 11-13 at Bala Vidya Mandir in Gandhi Nagar). After initial misgivings had been replaced with the confidence that can proceed only from the experience of repeated engagement, ROKA started combining eWaste collection with the collection of old clothes, and later mattresses and pillows and footwear hopelessly past their use-by date.

The more significant achievement is that it has consistently sought to increase the surface area of this initiative by delinking it from its hyperlocal moorings.

Residents from other parts of Chennai would drop off eWaste and return with the spark of an idea to have a similar initiative in their neck of the woods. ROKA has worked on the spark and that is how Manapakkam residents got to have a similar drive in their locality a few months ago.

This fifth drive — which focusses on eWaste discards, old clothes clothes, mattresses, pillows and footwear, largely that are too wornout to be reused — steps into the unchartered territory of having “multiple collection centres’, each functioning with a great degree of autonomy. Only that on the last day of the drive, they would all have uniformly collected the recyclables and kept them ready to be picked up. Janani Venkitesh of ROKA notes that all the groups are associated with the exercise on a pro bono basis. Even the recyclers do not seek a fee for collection of the waste,Given this situation, there are inevitable questions around how communities in a locality participating in the drive would eventually move the recyclables to a common point for collection by the recyclers. In Perumbakkam, where multiple communities have warmed up to the exercise, this logistical question is being grappled with.

Believing such wrinkles can be ironed out in subsequent editions, the organisers can pat themselves for the initiative’s increasing surface area.

On February 4, Janani Venkitesh shared that simultaneously, during the ROKA exercise, Rani Meyyammai Towers in RA Puram is running a drive for its residents; and Trellis South in Vadapalani for its own. She also notes that residents of Kotturpuram and Kottur Gardens are figuring out how they can participate in the exercise.

Janani elaborates: “In fact, we decided to have it down there in Tambaram as well, but realised that we do not have the bandwidth to go and support residents of Tambaram if they were to organise a drive this time. I do have a contact in Chitlapakkam — someone who is active in the Chitlapakkam Rising community — and he said it was too short a notice and has sought to know if ROKA could support them if they decide to have it in March. As far as this initiative goes, Tambaram is one of the areas that wait to be broken through. There have been a lot of calls in the last two to three years from residents of neighbourhoods in the Tambaram region, but unfortunately we have not been able to go there.”

Janani notes that due to the pandemic, the bi-annual recycling initiative has gone a bit off the rails, in terms of its timing. She calls it sad, as “we have noticed over these three years that even two drives a year are not sufficient.”