Midway Journey’s Weekly Cleanup Drive by citizens in Uzanbazar
Staff Reporter
GUWAHATI: The second phase of the Midway Journey’s weekly cleanup drive at Uzanbazar riverbank was inaugurated in the first week of the New Year. It is a citizens’ initiative led by the youth to spread awareness and take action from the grassroots against plastic pollution and so ensure proper waste management.
The initiative began on January 1, 2019 and the team worked consistently on every Sunday till April last to clean the banks of the Brahmaputra in the Uzanbazar area. The waste collected was segregated and sent for recycling. But, last year, in spite of these efforts, the team could not connect to the local people and the area became dirty.
Learning from previous experience and with a view to bringing awareness among the local people in recycling household waste, the volunteers became active this year. They are planning to clean the riverbank every Sunday and also work with the local municipality to segregate household waste through a five-month project. This year the representatives from various organizations like Binbag, Ashadeep NGO, Learning Space etc attended the inauguration. Ruby Das from PWD and GMC commissioner Debeswar Malakar also attended the programme and encouraged the youth with valuable suggestions and strong support to succeed in their mission.
More than 40 citizens cleaned a part of the riverbank and then segregated the collected waste into various categories. They have also made a pit in the bank to compost the collected wet waste. Also, they are collecting clean dry waste from the locality and planning to monetize the waste which will encourage households to segregate their domestic waste. The team has formed a research group to understand the issues of waste management in this ward, spread awareness about waste segregation among all domestic and commercial units of Uzanbazar and finally set up community drop of centres to collect dry waste every week.