P’kula school shows the green way
Ishrat S Banwait
Tribune News Service
Panchkula, November 25
While ‘save the environment’ campaigns are a hit in schools in theory, a private school in Panchkula is using stationery products made completely out of recycled paper.
The Gurukul in Sector 20 has been providing pencils, A-4 sheets, handmade paper, note books and registers to students made completely out of recycled paper in exchange for old newspapers and other used papers.
These pencils are a big hit among students, who say that they feel proud to contribute towards environment conservation. One pencil is made out of 1.5 kg papers and contains of no wood at all. The papers are compressed and rolled onto the lead in paper mills located in Ludhiana and Delhi. A brother-sister duo, Anju and Ashu Gupta, approached the school almost two years ago and till date they collect papers from the school and deliver finished products.
In the last 15 months, the school has recycled over 12 tonnes of paper. Principal Harsimran Kaur shared, “Fresh paper can be recycled up to five times but actually it does not even reach the first process of recycling and is destroyed. We are extremely delighted that our students are wholeheartedly participating in the drive.”
School also using sanitary napkin incinerators
To prevent clogging of drains and toilets and making disposal of sanitary napkins easier for girls, each girl’s washroom in the school has a sanitary napkin incinerator. These incinerators burn the napkin completely while emitting very little smoke. “Female students and teachers used to flush away the napkins in the past which used to clog the drains,” informed the principal. She adds that even if the napkins were thrown in the dustbin, the helpers would object to picking them up. These incinerators are bought from Tamil Nadu.
The implementation
To inculcate the habit of recycling and making the process simpler, each room in the school has a ‘recycle bin’ in addition to a dustbin. Students and teachers throw every bit of used paper in these bins which are collected and stored. Also, every month the interested students bring newspapers and other used papers from home and in turn can pick up whatever stationary they want. In the past, the school had come up with pencils made out of ‘neem’. This ensured
that if a child put a pencil in his mouth, no harmful chemicals entered his body. Instead, he was chewing on healthy ‘neem’. The school plans to come up with a seed at the back end of pencils in the future.
The principal informs that seeds like basil at the end will ensure once a pencil is used up, it can be planted to grow into a tree.
