How reuse culture in Chennai is promoting sustainability 

Two hyperlocal WhatsApp-defined groups in Chennai are showing residents in their respective localities how to free themselves of the tyranny of underused items in a socially and environmentally responsible manner

During the pandemic, life was reduced to its barest and most essential minimum. Wardrobes could be pared down: the regular sweatshirt and nightie were haute couture. One could get by on fewer possessions with the most indispensable one being the face-hugging mask. The commute became redundant. One could be parked at home along with their fancy car, and still enter workstations parked at homes thousands of miles away. The period offered gratuitous advertisement for minimalism. The birth of these two decluttering groups seemed organically linked to this pervasive climate.

These two groups — Declutter Elcot Avenue in Sholinganallur (date of birth: first half of 2020) and Marketplace @ Valmiki Nagar (DOB: November 2020) — facilitate the selling and buying of used items to promote a culture of reuse at the hyperlocal level, within communities defined by geography. These groups have gained loyal members by the dozens over the last four years while helping them “lose” underused things, thereby decluttering their spaces. 

It was formed a decluttering group. In a case of twisted irony, it needed the very solution it was offering the community.

A scrawny neonate when the pandemic crept in, this group grew into a hulk of a creature before the global health crisis was past, eventually becoming full to bursting. It was not alarming corpulence to be chipped away at, but valuable muscle that needed to be evenly distributed. Some members were “evacuated” from the primary WhatsApp group before it imploded from the pressure of its ballooning size and ushered into group two, which displays a similar growth pattern.

The numbers for both groups: Declutter Elcot Avenue 1 (it hit the ceiling on the number of members that can be in a WhatsApp group) and Declutter Elcot Avenue 2 (700).

Benazir Tehrani, who started this initiative and continues to watch over it, can allow herself some smugness.

“It is definitely really big because it has maxed out on one group, and now it is going to the other,” Benazir emphasises, adding that a telegram group existed but was struck off the list as a majority were not savvy in using it. She takes pride not so much in the size of this initiative as in its ability to galvanise the community into positive action.