Mumbai: Green initiative stops 190 kg of plastic from reaching city landfills

Safai Bank of India, a name synonymous with Mumbai's battle against plastic, collected 1.72 lakh multi-laminated plastic (MLP) wrappers in its first collection drive of 2023. With this, the organisation, which mimics the structure of banks, stopped 190 kg of MLPs from reaching the city's landfills.

The drive was undertaken by Safai Bank with the help of volunteers from three city schools, one college and a few commercial establishments and housing societies. The volunteers included two branches of Children's Academy in Malad and Thakur Complex in Kandivli; St Joseph's School in Wadala; Ramniranjan Jhunjhunwala College in Ghatkopar; Marathon Era housing society in Lower Parel; Rishi Gardens society in Malad; World Wildlife Federation (WWF) in Lalbaug; and D-Ert store in Bandra.

With an aim to reduce the amount of plastic waste reaching landfills, Mumbai-based NGO Mumbai Sustainability Centre (MSC) has been running ‘The Safai Bank of India' since 2018. The initiative has now expanded to various parts of the country including Delhi.

Student volunteers from Children's Academy deposit the MLP wrappers they collected

Rishi Agarwal, environmentalist and founder of MSC and Safai Bank, said, "Through the initiative, millions of plastic wrappers are diverted from reaching the city's dumping grounds and landfills. This year, at the beginning itself, we managed to collect 1.72 lakh MLP wrappers. I hope this encourages more people to join the initiative."

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This entails collection points in schools and colleges where students deposit MLP waste, such as wrappers of chips, biscuits, and chocolates among others, collected from their households or neighbourhood. "The collected MLP wrappers are then transferred to recyclers," Agarwal said.

What is MLP

MLP is difficult to recycle and has posed a massive challenge to all stakeholders, including companies, consumers and policymakers in the war against plastic. User industries, including packaged food companies, argue there is no replacement for MLP, which consists of multiple layers of plastic and other materials such as aluminium foils, paper, paperboards etc.

1.72L
Pieces of plastic wrappers collected during the drive