Abandoned Tins Transformed Into Bins
HYDERABAD: What’s the best anyone can make out of abandoned oil tins? Sell them as scrap for some money. But one student from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) collected all rusting oil tins from eatery owners at the campus and used them and transformed them into attractive dustbins.
Food courts spread across the vast campus are known to satisfy the fast-food appetite of students demanding large quantities of edible oil. “Most of the shop owners sell the empty oil tins or just throw them away. When I noticed quite a big number of them abandoned, I realised that something can be made out of them,” says Ajay Kumar, a Ph D student at the School of Management Studies at UoH. The university campus has more than 5,000 people on the campus that includes students, faculty members and also non-teaching staff from all over the country and abroad. Official estimates peg that quantum of waste produced inside the campus on a single day is four tractor loads. Managing this huge quantity of waste is a difficult task. While collection, segregation and recycling are three major steps involved in the scientific management of waste, students often dispose waste carelessly making collection, first step of waste management itself a difficult task. Installing bins across the 2300-acre campus is also not an easy task. “Though it is tedious, I knew that if dustbins were placed at strategic places, students would start disposing waste in them. With this thought in mind, I went and approached shop keepers,” shares Ajay adding that they were more than happy to give away the tins. Ajay then required some basic materials like metal wires, clamps and some paints. “The University administration sanctioned funds for this,” he informs. Transforming oil tins that come with just one small opening at the top into wide-mouthed dust bins was cumbersome. “They had to be drilled holes into and then cut. Many of these were lying abandoned for a long time,” shares Ajay. He named this mission ‘Tins to Dust bins’ and started a Facebook page asking for help. A total of 53 tins have been transformed into dust bins till date. All the dustbins are in attractive colours with messages like ‘Every day is Earth day’, ‘Reduce- Reuse- Reuse’, ‘Less Pollution is the Best Solution’ and so on.
Tins to Dustbins campaign also recieved encouragement from officials. “The primary material and the labour were sourced from the campus itself. It is the least expensive mode of waste management only `3500 had to be spent for all this,” says Prof. E Haribabu, Pro Vice- Chancellor, UoH.
This campaign is part of Ajay’s campus NGO called Free Service that was started in 2013 formed along with his friends, to collect funds for the ones affected by floods in Uttarakhand. Completely confined to the University of Hyderabad campus, Free Service has attracted a number of students to be part of its various programmes including beautifying the food court gardens, collecting plastic waste, cleaning popular hangout areas of students, making documentaries on waste management, awareness programmes for school children and so on. Free Service has a strong philosophy behind it. “Our habits are formed by our culture. And any culture which preserved its natural environment has sustained. We are a part of the environment and every human action affects the environment. We are the creators of waste on earth. So, we have to clean it up, feels Ajay.
– Joyel Pious
(Student, Dept of Communication, UoH)