The Aviral - Reducing Plastic Waste in the Ganga programme adopts a multi-pronged approach that spans infrastructural and educational needs to develop sustainable and scalable plastic waste management solutions. Through a thorough baseline assessment, the team identified much-needed data on waste quantity, categorisation, and flow for the two cities—working closely with local municipalities. These insights allowed the team to design a waste management system targeted at solving the cities specific issues. The team is now working on implementing and piloting these designs for each city, while planning the construction of a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) to enhance the existing efforts made by the Urban Local Bodies. 

In tandem with the infrastructure work, we are also conducting training workshops and awareness campaigns at the local level. Aiming to enlarge the impact of this capacity development activities, we are fostering the exchange of best practices and know-how across India through webinars and study trips engaging with municipality officials.

To engage the citizens of Rishikesh and Haridwar, our local team runs education and awareness campaigns on plastic waste segregation at a household level, and motivates them to participate in cleanup activities. In 2021 alone, nearly 5 tons of waste has been collected during Aviral cleanups.

Where in-person meetings are not possible, we turned to social media platforms and online sessions to continue outreach with the community. We contributed to the Ganga Box in collaboration with the Namami Gange Programme to develop a learning resource for school children and teach them about waste segregation, collection, and recycling with fun activities.

We also ran school engagement activities with over 8 schools across 2 cities, including virtual modules on the different aspects on the waste management system. In the first 3 months of the programme, we reached at least 300 students—helping grow the next generation of sustainability champions.