If you live in Chennai and have used milk, juice or other beverages that come in Tetra Pak cartons, you can now get the cartons recycled into furniture for government school students. ‘Take Me Back’ is a year-long campaign launched by Chennai-based Wasted Solutions to keep Tetra Pak waste out of Chennai’s overspilling landfills. The social venture aims to collect maximum number of cartons and recycle them into functional products for the community.
“It is likely that more people were stocking up on juice and milk cartons during the lockdown, as nobody wanted to step out or come in contact with people. What people don’t realise is that these cartons are easily recyclable and need not go to the city’s landfills. We launched ‘Take Me Back’ to promote segregation at source and raise awareness about recycling,” says Ann Anra, founder and creative head of Wasted.
Tetra Pak cartons are mainly made of paper. About 75% of the packaging is made from paper board, 20% from polyethylene and 5% from aluminium. “If you throw these cartons away instead of recycling, it is a criminal waste of a useful resource. The plastic and aluminium in the carton also take years to disintegrate,” Ann explains.
To address this, Ann and her team have set up 20 bins at drop off centres across Chennai. Here the city’s residents can drop their cleaned and flattened Tetra Pak covers. The entire carton along with the cap/straw is shredded and compressed using heat and pressure to convert it into chiipboard sheets. It is a zero waste process. These sheets are then converted into many useful things like furniture, desktop items, seats of auto rickshaws etc’, Ann adds.
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From Annanagar to OMR, the Wasted bins are located across 20 centres, mostly supermarkets, and cover the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) region. They will remain at these centres for a year, allowing residents to drop their used cartons often. For easy pickups, the campaign has tied up with delivery service provider Dunzo, which will send their partners to collect and drop off cartons at the deposit points.
“If there are too many cartons collected, then you can get Dunzo agents to pick it up and drop it off at the nearest bin. You can go to our website and request for a pick up,” Ann adds.
“We had launched a similar campaign in Mumbai in 2010, where we had 210 drop off points to drop Tetra Pak cartons. After the success of the campaign, we have come to Chennai with ‘Take Me Back’,” says Jaideep Gokhale, Vice President, Sustainability, Tetra Pak South Asia. The food packaging and processing MNC has invested in these campaigns as part of their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) initiatives.
Working with a city-based NGO, Arpanam Trust, Wasted Solutions has also trained volunteers who live in Perumbakkam’s Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board tenements, who were affected during the lockdown, to help dispose of cartons the right way.
“To carry our campaign forward, we are looking to engage with school and college students and would love for institutions or individuals to reach out to us via our website,” Ann shares.
Every day, Chennai generates close to 3,200 tonnes of garbage, according to data from Chennai Corporation’s Solid Waste Department. All of this is dumped at two main landfills in Kodungaiyur and Perungudi, which are overflowing with waste.
Take Me Back helps keep recyclable Tetra Pak waste out of these landfills and give back to the community. To learn more about the initiative and the various deposit points, visit: https://www.