Youth comes with gifts: one of them is the inability to recognize when you should be intimidated.
When two teenagers in New Delhi wanted to do something to improve the city’s waste collection, age and experience would have told them that they were out of their minds.
Yet just a few short years later and their nonprofit runs segregated waste collection in 14 Indian cities, and the teens picked up the International Children’s Peace Prize in honor of their work in public sanitation and environmental management.
But before they were recognized among global youth movements for staring down the problem of trash and recycling, Vihaan and Nav Agarwal were just trying to deal with asthma.
Vihaan’s cough and shortness of breath was caused almost without a doubt by the Delhi air quality, which is worsened so substantially by routine garbage burning. In 2017, when his asthma was getting more severe, part of the steaming Ghazipur landfill, sometimes called a “garbage mountain,” collapsed and spilled its fetid mass all over the local streets. Then it caught fire, bathing the city in apocalyptic smoke.
Seeing it, Vihaan realized his cough would never get better unless Delhi did a better job recycling its garbage. He and his brother started by separating waste at home into the classic categories, only to be told that their small household bags wouldn’t be taken by trash collection.
In the face of their first rejection, many would surely have conceded, but not the Agarwal brothers. They instead canvased their neighbors and created a little union of waste separation. When 15 households demanded their separated waste be taken for recycling, the authorities relented.
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“The main issue in waste management is that everybody thinks it’s not their job, or if the waste is out of their house, it’s out of their mind,” Vihaan told Euro News.
From 15 households, their imitative, OneStepGreener, now manages the segregated waste of 3,000—all of it taken to warehouses where workers ensure it’s further divided—newspapers are separated from A4 printing paper, PET plastic from polypropylene, and computer screens from keyboards. The more precise the separation, the better chance it will be recycled properly.
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The initiative also plants trees in urban areas to help combat air pollution, and it recently finished recycling 2 million pounds of waste: officially the same amount as what New Delhi’s 33 million urbanites generate in a day.
Nav Agarwal tells Euro News that if it can be done in Delhi, one of the largest, most polluted cities in the world, it can be done anywhere.
WATCH their work first hand below…
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