The Hindu 17.07.2018
A tonne of used ball pens to be sent for recycling
Saying no to plastic:Pens collected by student volunteers under the Mission Ball Pen initiative.
Students from 25 schools take part in Mission Ball Pen
Used ball pens weighing more than a tonne were collected from all
over the district as part of Mission Ball Pen, an initiative of Swasthy
Foundation in Kozhikode, in an effort to reduce plastic waste and
highlight the need to recycle it.
Student volunteers from 25
schools collected used ball pens from their neighbourhood and handed
them over to the Swasthy team. The closing ceremony of the campaign for
the year 2017-18 was held at Malabar Christian College Higher Secondary
School on Saturday, where the schools handed over the pens collected
over the year. The collected pens that weighed 106 kilograms were
exhibited at the venue.
Environmentalist T.V. Rajan was the guest
of honour at the event, in which AUP School, Kottur and NGO Quarters
Higher Secondary School that performed well in the initiative were
honoured.
Mission Ball Pen is the brainchild of Harishankar S.
Nair and Shabab Karunyam who, as undergraduate students, had volunteered
to collect pens as part of ‘Pen Drive to Biennale’ almost two years
ago. They had collected more than one lakh pens at the time, that were
used for an installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. They realised
that students continued to collect pens in the schools, but did not know
what to do with them. This triggered the Mission Ball Pen initiative.
The mission is not just about collecting pens, but also about creating
awareness in schools and colleges on the three Rs – reduce, reuse, and
recycle.
The pens collected on Saturday were handed over to Green Worms, a waste management venture in Kozhikode, to be recycled.