From pilgrimage routes to festive pandals, India’s largest public gatherings are increasingly becoming an opportunity to take the message of responsible waste management directly to citizens.
Building on its recent on-ground awareness campaign along the Kanwar Yatra route, APR Bharat has collaborated with the All India Plastics Manufacturers’ Association (AIPMA) and Global Conclave on Plastics Recycling & Sustainability (GCPRS), to take recycling advocacy through its recently rolled out ‘Zero Waste Celebration for Bappa’ initiative in Maharashtra.
The initiative, launched by chief minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis, seeks to encourage responsible waste segregation, collection and recycling during Ganesh Chaturthi. It is being supported by Keshav Srushti and Supreme Petrochem Limited (SPL).
For APR Bharat, the initiative represents the next step in its efforts to make recycling awareness more visible, accessible and action-oriented, particularly in environments where large volumes of recyclable waste are generated within a short period.
As part of the initiative, organizers will facilitate the separate collection of plastic waste, thermocol (EPS), flowers, artificial flowers and other recyclable decorative materials generated during the festivities. The collected materials will be directed towards appropriate recycling and recovery channels, demonstrating how segregation at source can help convert discarded materials into useful resources.
Plastic waste collected through the initiative can be recycled into products such as bottles, benches and T-shirts, while thermocol can find applications in products such as photo frames and wall panels. Flowers can also be processed into products such as incense sticks.
For APR Bharat, the focus is not simply on collecting waste bottle but on creating greater public understanding of the journey of a recycled PET after it is discarded, from collection and segregation to recycling and its eventual return as a new bottle with resource efficient recycled PET.
“Recycling of bottles can become a meaningful habit only when people understand what happens to the bottles they put in a collection bin. Our experience has shown that awareness is most effective when it is taken directly to people and linked to simple actions that they can undertake themselves. Festivals and large community gatherings provide a powerful platform for this because they bring people together at scale. Through ‘Zero Waste Celebration for Bappa’, we want to reinforce the message that responsible segregation and collection can ensure that every used bottle can become a valuable resource in Nation Building by replacing crude imports which create significant strain on country’s forex reserves,” Goutham Jain, director general, APR (Association of PET Recyclers) Bharat, said.
The Ganesh Chaturthi initiative builds on APR Bharat’s ‘Bottle Ki Recycle Yatra,’ which took the message of PET bottle recycling along the Kanwar Yatra route in Muzaffarnagar and Meerut.
The campaign helped bring over 50,000 used PET bottles into the formal recycling ecosystem, demonstrating the potential of targeted, on-ground awareness initiatives to encourage responsible disposal and channel used PET bottles towards recycling.
