ASB Students Convert Waste into Wealth
All MBA students subscribe to business newspapers that accumulate over time at the college hostels. Goparaju Mythreya, first year MBA student of Amrita’s Coimbatore Campus, shares his experience of making money for village children, by recycling old newspapers from the hostels.
On October 24th, volunteers from 1st year MBA started collecting old newspapers from the MBA hostels with the aim of recycling them and providing the funds for the Village Outreach Program.
We collected a whopping 920 kgs of old newspaper over all. We sold all the paper on Wednesday, November 3rd to a recycler near the campus. We managed to secure Rupees 5520 because the recycler offered us Rupees 6 per kg.
We donated Rupees 5000 for the Village Outreach program on the same day. The amount was used to purchase clothes for the village kids on account of Diwali.
Future Plans
There is a value in segregating paper like Economic Times at its source into white and colored paper. Even though we tried to segregate the paper at the boys hostel, while we were transporting it to the recyclers, most of it got mixed up again.
Keeping this in mind, we have decided to invest the Rupees 520 still with us in improving infrastructure in the MBA hostels for better paper waste management. We will make arrangements for two separate wide baskets on the very floor where paper is dumped. Apart from that, we will buy large gunny bags with over 50 kgs capacity to transport the paper safely. Volunteers would then be able to transfer monthly the contents of these baskets to a safe room. As we tend to accumulate a ton of paper every trimester, we can recycle the whole lot every three months.
What we have done this week, was to provide a proof of concept. We will do it better next time, in February. In the meantime, please don’t throw away your old newspapers; give them to us.