With the Centre as well as State government’s coming up with innovative ideas to tackle the menace of plastics, Mulugu district in Telangana has come up with a novice barter system – One Kg rice for One Kg of Plastic.
A quite impressive programme, the newly formed district has started showing results as more and more people have started interested in it. The district administration hopes of becoming the first district in Telangana to become single use plastic free.
Initiated on October 16, collection centres have been open in all the 174 grama panchayats. The plastic that is collected is sent to cement manufacturing units.
The District Collector was quoted in the media as saying that the idea was evolved after a school competition where in the children were promised a cricket kit of they collected 1,000 kg of plastic. He said that if this barter idea could be used for making people collect plastic. The results have started to show, he added. As part of the drive, donations were also expected in cash as well as rice. The district administration has said this was also widely accepted by the people.
Apart from this initiative, the district administration has also started to distribute cloth bags. For the job of cloth bags, a tailor was hired in each village for a small honorarium. And this tailor has to stitch bags free for those who came with old and new clothes.
