Did you know that the empty pet bottles that you throw away come back
to you in the form of clothes? That the aluminium foils and Chinese
cloth bags that you get from the grocery shops these days are actually
plastic?

For those who think waste management is all about packing
off their non-biodegradable waste in a truck, a visit to the material
recovery facility and plastic recycling plant run by Green Worms at West
Hill in the city will be an eye-opener.

Green Worms, an
organisation that works in the waste management sector in Kozhikode,
started the facility just five months ago as the next step in their
mission for a clean State. Founded by social entrepreneur Jabir Karat,
Green Worms has been focussing on waste-free events for a few years, at
the same time setting up recycling facility in some parts of the
district.

At present, Green Worms runs two material recovery
facilities near the West Hill railway station where waste materials
undergo a long process before they are either recycled or shipped off to
recycling facilities in other parts of the country. Around 30 people
work in the units, while there are teams of around five employees each
in nine hospitals in the city to collect and segregate the
non-biodegradable medical waste.

Plastic bags

The
conventional plastic bags first go through a de-dusting machine before
they are manually segregated into those that can be and cannot be
recycled. “The ones with multilayer packing and lamination cannot be
recycled. So we shred them to be used in the construction of roads. We
supply the shredded plastic to Green Kerala Mission as well as the
Uralungal Labour Contractors’ Cooperative Society,” said Mr. Karat.

The
recyclable plastic is melted at high temperature and converted into
plastic lumps that are in high demand for manufacture of pipes for
agriculture.

Green Worms collect their raw materials from around
80 residents’ associations in the district, nine hospitals in the city, a
few apartment complexes and panchayats. The plastic bottles are
sub-segregated on the basis of colour and quality, crushed and sent to
recycling plants in Gujarat, from where they come out as polyester yarn.
Waste rexins often substitute coal in the cement kilns as fuel.

However,
recycling e-waste is the most complicated affair, said Mr. Karat. “The
scrap dealers often discard the plastic after extracting metal parts
from e-waste. They have no other option,” he said.

“But, recycling is not the simplest answer to the waste management woes of Kerala, reduction is,” added Mr. Karat.