Conversations around waste and pollution are on the rise and rightly so. With most of India’s waste being relocated to landfills, there is no centred solution to reducing the waste over time. Glass is one of the materials that are usually looked over and is also perhaps tedious to deal with. To tackle this, Udit Singhal decided to take matters into his own hands.
When he was a 16-year-old student at The British School, New Delhi, he noticed that glass bottles were not being picked up by his local waste collectors due to required storage space and high transportation costs. This led to them being transported to landfills, where they would not decompose for centuries to come.
In Udit’s search for a solution, he imported a GLSand machine from New Zealand that helped convert the glass to fine sand, and that is how the environmental service Glass2Sand began. However, now the organisation is powered by a made-in-India machine. Glass2Sand is also carbon negative after eliminating the emissions caused by the high-load import from New Zealand.
The resultant glass is used for various purposes including construction, lining in furnaces, laying of roads, and more. Since glass bottles come in various colours, they can be used for aesthetic purposes too.
You can pledge bottles to Glass2Sand or even purchase the sand from them. Information for both these initiatives can be found here.
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