Thiruvananthapuram: The Green Army is no longer confined to Thiruvananthapuram, as a unit has been started at a public school at Cimahi in Bandung, Indonesia.
This is one of the outcomes of the International Zero Waste Cities Conference 2018 which was held from March 5 to 8 at Bandung, where Green Army mentors from Thiruvananthapuram were invited. “We had gone to Cimahi 6 school, a public school where the students were doing several environmental activities like composting dry leaves and hydroponic farming. We started a green army unit there. The Green Army is now international,” says Babitha P.S, one of the two mentors who represented Green Army at the conference.
YPBB Bandung will mentor the green army unit, so that students can support waste management campaigns. In the future, student exchange programmes between the green army units might be implemented.
Green protocol was another idea which many conference members wanted to learn about. District Collector K. Vasuki, who talked about Suchitwa Mission initiatives at the conference, says, “As an initiative which aimed to reduce consumerism, green protocol captured everyone’s interest. There was a representative from San Francisco who was full of praise. As you know America is a consumerist society.”
There was representation from 13 countries. There was a lot to learn as well, according to Green Army mentor Dr Ashin Mohan. “The children there are very creative. They would turn rejects into such beautiful things of value. It would look so perfect that one would not be able to know that it was made from inorganic waste,” he says.
At Bandung, there is a ‘waste bank’. When people deposit waste, an amount gets credited into their accounts. Segregated waste gets higher value. “There segregation is intensive. People separate it into sachets, multilayer plastic and so on.”
