Morung Express News
Dimapur | April 26
Renjanthung L Patton is an emerging entrepreneur with a cause. The young Naga started ‘Act for India’, a small venture that seeks to help tackle the scourge of plastic waste. He intends to do so by promoting reusable and recyclable aluminium bottles in schools and educational institutions so that they won’t have to buy disposable plastic bottles.
Renjan, 24, knows from personal experience how handy such a bottle can be. He also firmly believes that it’s truly time for a policy response to the existing environmental crisis and called upon decision makers to start acting.
Concerned by the tremendous amount of plastic waste generated in his neighbourhood and hometown, he spent the past two years in lockdown researching how to effectively reduce plastic waste. Plastic use cannot be completely stopped, he said, acknowledging that it also has several important functions.
However, we can reduce the quantity of plastics and minimise its harmful effects.
The idea of the reusable bottle came to him when he noticed the extraordinary amount of plastic water bottles that were used especially during programmes in schools and colleges
“I don’t just look at the plastic laying around and think how are we going to get rid of this?” he explained. “I think, Okay how can we reduce this? Plastic is a valuable resource but its use should be sustainable and we need to begin in places where the foundations of education is laid.”
His solution: Curb the quantity of one-use water bottles with his Act for India reusable bottles. The product is a reusable water bottle made entirely of recyclable food-grade aluminium.
In order to set his plan in motion, Renjan has put the focus on the academic institutions as it is the most suitable platform to impart the awareness and sensitization of the impacts of plastic products. Explaining that schools and educational institutions are places with huge concentration of people with some having enrolment of at least 1000-2000 students, he said that “Academic institutions can make this project successful by laying down a positive agenda by incorporating zero plastic customized sipper bottles as part of their essential daily campus usage, like their uniform.”
This, he maintained, would reduce the utilisation of single-use plastic on a large scale.
In addition to helping save the environment, the reusable bottles can also save money for its users and become an informal way to inculcate a sense of responsibility among the youth in addition to Environmental Science which is already in school curriculums, he reasoned.
He has put forward the proposal for collaborations in educational institutions in Nagaland, and so far a few of them have agreed to collaborate with Act for India and implement about seven thousand bottles. He expressed optimism that more institutions would join in.
Focused on the global need for both environmental and social change, the start-up Renjan has set up is committed that it will diversify its target, and offer various customisable designs, for education, hospitals, corporate institutions, and other collective centers.
“We’re still in the seed stage, but we’re about to take off,” he said, while emphasising that such initiatives, when backed by concerned authorities, adds weight on the collective consciousness and makes the engagement towards anti-plastic issues more productive.
“We, therefore, need the help and support of the authority of academic institutions in giving out a voice towards the drive to build a campus which does not confine itself to the conventional ways of creating environmental awareness,” he added.
Meanwhile, noting that Government Departments also utilise single-use mineral water bottles on the large scale, Renjan he hopes to introduce informal education in various departments so that in the coming days there is greater awareness and cleaner Nagaland through these departments. “Nagaland government departments have immense potentials to bring about change in educating the impact of single-use plastics, given the ratio of government employees in Nagaland,” he said.
He maintained that Act for India is based on the principles of the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission and as such, would be suitable for implementation across the state.
Renjan who is currently pursuing a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management in Delhi NCR also informed that a website will soon be launched so that people who are interested can learn more about the start-up.
