- Rhino Machines innovates to upcycle plastic waste along with green sand waste to manufacture Silica Plastic Block
- Don’t blame it on plastic – blame it on our habits which are possible to improve, plastic can be converted to a multiple-use plastic and recycled again and again
- Had plastic has been sold at the price of gold, would we throw it away?
For quite some time we have been “blaming” plastic as a problem, but can we take a step back and understand where the real problem is? As a material, plastic has been an excellent find, with tremendous saving in resources with its unique properties of lightweight, strength, flexibility and various forms – various shapes. To me, personally plastic is one of the best things which happened to us.
Yes, plastic has a disadvantage of not being bio-degradable, but that is when we dump it in the ground or landfilling or oceans. Did plastic tell us to do so? NO!
Time has shown, that when resources are made available to the human being at a low cost, we tend to forget the value of the same. Had plastic been sold at the price of gold, would we throw it away? If the internet was as expensive as it was a decade back, would we use it as much as we do today?
Could it not be that the problem is US, the PEOPLE – is it not that our habits are not aligned, and we have not been able to build an ecosystem.
It reminds me of Mahabharata’s story of Abhimanyu – he knew how to break the chakravyu but did not know the exit route. Did we realise the exit or recycling route of Plastic before it came in our life – no we did not. It is not very easy to think of an exit route as we cannot think so long, and in my view it is representing the way we have been habituated. Till it comes onto us, we do not think.
But yes, we have been able to work on the problem at Rhino Machines & ACE Foundation. We realized very soon that plastic was actually our enabler to take care of other waste, and it was not as “BAD” as it was shown. It was only a question of changing habits. In the time when we started working on the Rhino Silica Plastic Block (SPB) Project, I had also started studying the reasons of why businesses may not succeed, and the impact of culture on the business outcome with the UNCTAD – Empretec Program. The two elements synergized and it brought a lot of clarity in our approach to the mission – the problem was at our habits.
What we did over a period of time was to start investing in habit formation of collecting at source, engaging with ACE Foundation, Concept Biotech, AFS India, Shaligram Greens, VUIA (Industries association), employees of Rhino Machines and two major contributors – Elecon Group & Krishna Hospital from Anand.
For us, plastic is an asset and the beauty is that even the so-called single-use plastic can be converted to a multiple-use plastic and recycled again and again. What we may need to look at is that the problem lies with the habits to separate waste at source and establish a system to collect and bring to solutions such as SPB.
Plastic is not a problem for us, it is a solution for addressing other wastes from the industry. Don’t blame it on plastic – blame it on our habits which are possible to improve. Join our mission and log on to www.rhinospb.in – we are ready to collaborate anywhere in India to help set up ecosystems which are self-sustained, scalable and manageable.