Knowledge
Why are students from 37 schools in India learning a subject called Garbology and enjoying it?
When material distributed to students during the ‘Litter free Auroville’ campaign became a hit, Chandrah and Ribhu were motivated to formally launch WasteLess India to develop content to formally integrate with school curriculum. The result is Garbology.
India seems to be grappling with a problem of rising mounds of waste. To many it points to the inadequacy of the civic authorities to tackle the waste menace. However, it wouldn’t have crossed the minds of people that civic authorities stand at the end of the cycle. The cycle actually begins with individual attitude and behaviour.
Economic reforms and the process of liberalisation in the early 90s introduced India to large scale consumerism. While the consumption patterns changed fuelled by mass production and innovative marketing, however, our education system and waste management infrastructure did not. When new forms of waste are thrust upon primitive systems, the result is the burgeoning problem of garbage; a common problem that plagues most cities today.
When Chandrah Nusselein was participating in relief work in coastal Tamil Nadu in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2004, she found that there was little or no awareness about proper waste management techniques along with a shortage of infrastructure. All this was contributing and compounding the health problems among affected communities. She was convinced that the solution to the problem of garbage could only be arrived at by introducing large scale behaviour change through education and citizen empowerment.
Carrying this seed in her mind back home to Auroville, Chandrah began studying the township’s waste management systems in the right earnest and set about changing the way the community produced and managed its waste. In 2009, with her brother Ribhu Vohra, she organised the ‘Litter Free Auroville’ campaign. The campaign saw over 2000 residents joining in and students of 17 local schools received educational material on waste management.
The response to the campaign was overwhelming. “All the schools returned, asking for such material to be included in their regular curriculum,” says Vohra. The turning point was when they discovered that merely 6 months of using the educational material, students were not only adopting newly-learned behaviour themselves, but were also trying to change the consumption and waste disposal behaviour of their families.
This was the fillip that drove Vohra and Nusselein to give serious thought to the creation of educational material that could be seamlessly integrated with school curriculum. Thus WasteLess India was born in 2011.
The next year, WasteLess’s premier offering, ‘Garbology 101’ – 101 innovative games and activities for waste education was born.
“We target children between the ages of 8 and 15 because that’s when they are curious and most interested in learning. They also stand to inherit the mess we are making today and they need to have the tools to clean it up,” says Vohra.
Children are also effective agents of behavioural change at the level of the household.
These activities are designed to address waste from diverse perspectives and offer a wide range of themes for children to comprehend the inter-relatedness of waste with things around them.
Children go on 101 journeys through the complex world of waste, examining how and where it is produced, its impact on natural resources, the systems that handle and dispose it, and their role as consumers in reducing waste.
The Garbology toolkit combines physical tasks, card and board games, and colouring activities for different academic levels. Teachers can use the kits either to complement or substitute regular lessons for environmental education and social studies; it can also be taught as a stand-alone subject.
They upcycle used Tetrapaks into wallets while studying resource conservation and study the packaging on soft drinks to understand their environmental impact. They compare linear and cyclical economies, analyse advertisements and evaluate their consumption habits accordingly.
To ensure compatibility with the formal, tightly structured Indian school system, the flexible curriculum of Garbology was adapted and made easy for teachers to use and to allow for periodic learning assessments.
To actively involve teachers into the curriculum, the WasteLess team also trains school teachers to understand and link different topics and use Garbology effectively.
Garbology currently reaches 32,000 students in 37 private and aided schools in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Pondicherry, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka and Uttarakhand. It is also used by WasteLess’ NGO partners in educational programmes in their network of schools.
There is a visible and positive impact of Garbology in schools which have begun waste segregation and composting, or have set up recycling units on their campuses, donating the proceeds from selling recyclable waste to developmental activities. “In one Chennai-based school, the children have now started a campaign to train their parents in waste segregation,” Nusselein says.
There were certain government schools where Garbology did not do well, the WasteLess team developed an innovative game called ‘Pick-it-Up.’ The game teaches children the economic value of recycling waste. With a handbook of activity-based lessons and accompanying card games, students learn the hierarchy of value of different categories of waste based on their recyclability. For example, metal and plastic waste has the highest value followed by paper and glass.
WasteLess’ first task while developing Pick-it-Up was to map the items bought and the rates offered by scrap dealers across 15 different locations across India.
“The aim of the game,” Vohra explains, “is to reinforce in children, and by extension, their parents, that there is economic value in segregating and recycling waste. We hope that once they understand the economic benefits, the positive behaviour is automatically reinforced.”
‘Pick-it-Up’, currently in its pilot phase, will be shared through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to reach government school children through NGO and corporate partnerships. “Once we successfully reach 5000 kids, we can integrate the best practices into government school education,” says Nusselein optimistically.
The largely grant-funded enterprise currently uses crowdfunding campaigns and service fees to scale its products and make them available free-of-cost to students across the country.
In the offing is a new game called ‘kNOw Your Plastics,’ developed after extensive consultation with global experts. It teaches children to differentiate between plastics and use them correctly by reading their Resin Identification Codes.
“We are sure it will work,” Vohra smiles. They’re confidence is warranted. Following a recent pilot, a teacher reported that children had begun to look under different products to find their resin codes. Adds Nusselein, “Once they realised that many of their lunch boxes were made of PVC, they switched to polypropylene or stainless steel!”
The game will reach 1000 NGOs later this year. An app will also be launched in 2017 which will allow players to learn about the impact of plastic on the planet and help them make smart choices.
With Government of India funding, 10 Garbology activities will also be available for free use on WasteLess’ website later this year.
Sustained, long term change is only possible through systems change.
WasteLess’ efforts of working with children, aims to create citizens of tomorrow who value strong systems and who will vote into power governments that will help provide them.