29 July,2021 03:18 PM IST | Mumbai | Anuka Roy
The shelter for stray dogs was made with almost 150 eco bricks, equaling 40 kgs of plastic waste, by team Urvari. Photo Courtesy: Vasundhara Gupte
Last year, on the occasion of âPlastic Free July', a team of teenagers from Navi Mumbai decided to make shelters for street dogs using plastic waste. The monsoon season has always been particularly tough on stray dogs with few spaces to give them cover. So team Urvari - an amalgamation of the Sanskrit words âurvi' (earth) and âvaari' (water) - decided to make a refuge for them using âeco bricks'. "All of the plastic waste like chips packets, wrappers etc that come to our house are stuffed inside empty plastic bottles tightly and that is how you make an eco brick," explains Vasundhara Gupte, co-founder of Urvari.
Urvari was started in 2019 by Gupte and her friend Khushi Shah, who were 16 years old at the time. They were so overwhelmed by the news about Amazon fires, they decided it is time to do their bit for the environment. They started with a simple goal - planting five trees each week. What started as an individual effort now has culminated into a team of 200 volunteers across India. The team - which mostly comprises 17 and 18 year olds - initially did not know what to do with the eco bricks. So, they gave them for recycling. However, looking at how miserable the monsoon proves for the strays, they started working on the idea of creating something for these animals with the help of eco bricks. "It was a very ambitious project. This had never been done before because we didn't have a tutorial on YouTube. The collection of plastic from all over Mumbai was also a tedious process," says Gupte. They required 150 eco bricks, which equals almost 40 kgs of plastic waste.
The members of the group Urvari. Photo Courtesy: Vasundhara Gupte
After a year of collecting plastics from almost every part of the city, they finally built the shelter. "We got permission from our local corporator. He allowed us to place it at Rajiv Gandhi Udyan, Sector 29, Vashi," she says. Elaborating on the specifications of the shelter structure, Gupte shares that the bricks are covered with mesh, so that they stick together and also to protect the dogs from chewing on the plastic. It is a very heavy structure, with the outer skeleton made of metal angles. The roof has a thin layer of polyurethane foam to insulate the shelter. The dimensions of the shelter are about 4.5x 3.5x3.5 ft.
Ten years ago Australian Rebecca Prince-Ruiz founded the Plastic-Free July challenge, which has now grown into a global movement. It is a reminder for us to limit single use plastic, and encourages people to take small steps towards being eco-friendly. But are we doing enough? Initiatives like Urvari give us hope that we are headed in the right direction, but there's still a long and challenging road ahead to achieve the desired goal.
While the group wants to implement the shelter in other parts of the city, it can prove to be challenging for them. "My only challenge here is that the shelters require a lot of eco bricks - as I had mentioned. It's not easy for us to collect and then sit and stuff the plastic wastes inside these bottles." Gupte continues, "What we are hoping to achieve at one point is that this becomes a self-sustaining system, where eco bricks become a part of people's daily life." Gupte feels eco bricks can be used to make other things as well. She says this is also a way for them to give back to the community. Urvari is always looking for volunteers and ways to spread awareness about eco bricks, so that they can do more such projects.
They seem to be headed in the right direction when it comes to expanding their efforts. As mentioned in the Mid-day Dossier, Giants Group of Chowpatty and Rotaract Club of Mumbai Downtown, who have been conducting monthly drives to collect plastic waste for three years now, recently joined hands with Urvari to extend the efforts to make dog shelters. "We are glad that we are getting more people in this project to expand to other parts of the city. We soon hope that it becomes a pan-India phenomenon"
