GUWAHATI, 2 Jan: The Midway Journey organised the inauguration of the second season of its weekly cleanup drive at the Uzanbazar riverbank on 1st January 2020. It is a citizen’s initiative led by the youth to spread awareness and take grassroot action in the field of plastic pollution and waste management.
This initiative started on 1st January 2019 and the team worked consistently on every Sunday till April last week to clean the banks of the Brahmaputra in Uzanbazar area. The waste collected was segregated and recycled materials were sent for recycling. But, last year, inspite of these efforts, the team couldn’t connect to the local people and the area again became dirty after the team had cleaned the place.
Learning from previous experience, this time, the team with its group of volunteers are planning to clean the riverbank every Sunday and also work with the local municipality to segregate household waste through a 5 month project. This year the aim is to educate the entire community to reduce and recycle household waste and also set up drop off centres for dry waste at different locations of uzanbazar.
Representatives from various organisations like Binbag, Ashadeep NGO, Learning Space etc attended the inauguration. Ruby Das from PWD and GMC commissioner Debeswar Malakar also attended the program and encouraged the youth with valuable suggestions and strong support to succeed in their mission.
More than 40 citizens cleaned a part of the riverbank and then segregated the collected waste into various categories. They have also made a pit in the bank to compost the collected wet waste. Also, they are collecting clean dry waste from the locality and planning to monetise the waste which will encourage households to segregate their domestic waste. The team has formed a research group to understand the issues of waste management in this ward, spread awareness about waste segregation among all domestic and commercial units of uzanbazar and finally set up community drop of centres to collect dry waste every week.
