My Journey:

From back when I was a child I’ve always felt very close to nature. Growing up in Chandigarh, I was always climbing the trees in my backyard and being an assistant to our maali bhaiya. Denied a pet due to ours being a nuclear family, I would end up playing with stray animals the entire summer holidays, feeding squirrels and I even had a pet caterpillar before it disappeared on me. However, once I finished school the connection with nature was lost. Summer holidays, which used to be a time to connect with nature and even visit various parts of Himachal to explore, ceased.

Fast forward almost 10 years later, time enough for the degradation of the planet to have gotten way out of hand – be it cows, whales and turtles alike, dying due to plastic in their bellies, the unsightly amount of plastic floating around in our rivers and oceans, and for many beautiful species to be under the threat of extinction. At this point, I used to live in a shared home and had a house help who took care of disposing our collective waste. My view of the problem of waste was the lack of proper disposal into dustbins and not littering. I would collect mine and others’ wrappers in my bag without any qualms, to dispose them at the end of the day.

Soon after, I moved into a 1BHK with my cats and was taking care of the house on my own, frequently ordering food in for the convenience. This turned out to be an eye opener for me! The problem, I could now see, was of the HUGE HUGE amount of waste generated with all our online shopping, home deliveries, etc. To top that, waste which is in perfectly good condition and should be recycled or reused but is just being dumped without any segregation. There was also the issue of sanitary waste – which must be incinerated, but is simply dumped alongside food, paper and cardboard for waste-collectors and ragpickers (often young children) to go through – just the imagery of this made my stomach turn!

At this point in time, I started making a few changes – I would wash and reuse all the food containers I got from deliveries, I shifted my cats to compostable and flushable litter, I started segregating waste and handed whatever was accepted to the raddi wala (curb-side recycler), which was not a lot. Further, I had already been experimenting with a menstrual cup and made a decision to purchase reusable cloth pads to ease the shift.

As I saw the large percentage of recyclable yet un-recycled waste which the recycler didn’t accept (due to marginal earnings), I realized the only real way ahead is to reduce the amount of waste I am generating.

At this time, I am happy to say that I am living a relatively minimalistic lifestyle – I order less online, I try to save electricity and water whenever possible (some thing I feel we’ve forgotten to do in the daily drills of our jobs), I carry my own carry bag (and smaller ones) when I go shopping and I also carry a tiffin box and cutlery set in my bag incase I end up snacking outside or need to get left-overs packed.

I have also started “REFUSING” to purchase products if I see they come with unnecessary plastic.

What comes next:

The way ahead for me consists of a few key things I intend to work on in the long run. I want my home to be self-sustaining in terms of in-house composting, rainwater harvesting and solar panels. In the short term, I want to reduce my consumption of milk and other dairy since it’s all packed in single-use packs including Tetra Pak, which I now know are not easily recyclable and the dairy industry is also one of the biggest polluters and sources of animal cruelty.

I have started recycling, but I want to get to a level that I am confident that not even a part of my waste gets dumped, by ensuring it reaches the right stakeholders.

Lastly, I want to be able to encourage my friends and family to make few small changes which are easy to do (example, carrying your own cutlery), which can drastically reduce the amount of waste they produce.

About the Author:

An Air Force-kid, engineer-turned-MBA with 4 years of corporate experience with companies like American Express and 3M, Eesha is curious to see how she can make a change for plastic reduction not only in her personal life, but also as a part of her organization, be it decision making in her areas of concern or internal sustainability programs. An ardent believer that in all our spheres of life, we are decision makers in some way and we should be able to use that positively, Eesha strives to make small changes wherever she can to reduce plastic consumption.
Her plastic footprint has reduced from 39.73 kilos to 5.48 kilos in 6 months.