Recycling initiative gains greater surface area in Chennai

With multiple collection centres in place, ROKA’s fifth eWaste and clothes collection drive seems to have taken on a truly pan-Chennai character, stretching from Mylapore to Perumbakkam

Anything that is seen will be seen again and again and yet again: sometimes only in the mind, and sometimes as a concrete reality. Call it a positive case of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, resident groups are ‘seeing’ eWaste more often; and they are also seeing the necessity of carefully seeing these dangerous discards all the way to the place from where they would not make an insidious comeback. The fact that eWaste requires careful handling meant that it had been persistently kept as a footnote in recycling initiatives promoted by residents’ groups in Chennai. Over the last three years, the scene has shifted with a handful of groups — Residents of Kasturbanagar Association (ROKA) being a prominent one among them — beginning to see eWaste as a category deserving focussed attention.

This residents’ group from the neighbourhood of Kasturba Nagar has organised five eWaste drives in three years, with the fifth one in the offing (February 11-13 at Bala Vidya Mandir in Gandhi Nagar). After initial misgivings had been replaced with the confidence that can proceed only from the experience of repeated engagement, ROKA started combining eWaste collection with the collection of old clothes, and later mattresses and pillows and footwear hopelessly past their use-by date.

The more significant achievement is that it has consistently sought to increase the surface area of this initiative by delinking it from its hyperlocal moorings.