1,355,000 grams...

SAVE SOUTHERN AVENUE 2009
82,000 grams
+ 137,000 grams
+ 506,000 grams
+ 117,000 grams
+ 513,000 grams
Of wine bottles, hair combs, ice cream wrappers, gutka pouches, cigarette packets, plastic bags, trouser belts, toothbrushes, ID cards, condoms, sanitary pads, shirts, medicine bottles, toothpaste tubes, cigarettes, bus tickets, polyurethane strips, spoons, shoe soles, running shoes, cement bags, purses, ice cream cups, bidi pouches etc.


It was a day of landmarks!

These are the two achieved: our motley collection of children and a few adults crossed the ONE TONNE mark in garbage collection; we achieved a record morning collection of 513 kgs (beating our previous best by 7 kgs).

And these happened for some pleasantly unexpected reasons.

Members of St James’ Nature Club turned up for the first time.
Some locality residents decided to sit on the fence no longer.
Some morning walkers stopped, thought and then asked, ‘Can we join?’
Absolutely unknown people volunteered their Ikons and Marutis to cart the garbage to the KMC vat

The result is that we ran short of collections bags, had to take the first load of bags to the vat, empty them and immediately drive back and hand them over for effective collecting.

This is what we did:
Cleaned and collected on the patch of green (sorry, brown) in front of Menoka Cinema.
Encountered more bricks, concrete and fragments than before so allocated teams to address these heavy duty items specifically.
Continued to attack plastic and paper.

The agenda for the coming week:

Add a weekday and Saturday collection sortie
Network with the KMC on how we can get bricks etc off the green (really heavy stuff!)
Put in a day of ripping posters off trees (nailing them is illegal!)

The team will resume its cleaning exercise at 6:00 on Saturday and Sunday and work until 8 across the Menoka Cinema stretch on Sarat Chatterjee Avenue .

“We intend to have a larger turnout next Sunday as some students are likely to join in with their exams getting over,” says Arman Sood. “Our target is to get to two tonnes of consolidated collected waste next Sunday!”

Will you join?

Or do you know any young adult in your house, building or neighbourhood who would be interested to help?

Please ask her / him to contact Armaan Sood at 98304 33663.

Be a part of Kolkata’s solution!