 |
|||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
By Anil Netto PENANG, Malaysia, Nov 14 (IPS) - Leela Panikkar and Christa Hashim sent tongues clucking when they quit their jobs and set up a non- profit company that, essentially, collected trash. Today, two years later, the two women have people shaking their heads -- in amazement.
While their first recycling centre managed to collect only a measly 300 kg of trash during its first month of operation, Panikkar and Hashim's company now handles as much as 35 tonnes of recyclable waste a month.
Treat Every Environment Special Sdn Bhd (TrEES) now also boasts of 11 recycling centres located strategically throughout Kuala Lumpur, with each earning an average of 1,800 U.S. dollars a year.
Seven of the TrEES centres, which act as community drop-off points for recyclable waste, are at welfare homes while the other four are at retail shops and supermarkets. Items accepted include glass bottles, aluminium and steel cans, wearable old clothes and all kinds of paper.
The clothes are sold in local kampong or villages, or sent to Burma. The rest of the collected items are sold directly to recycling firms.
About 10 percent of the centres' total earnings go into TrEES's recycling programme. The rest of the proceeds earned by centres at welfare homes benefit the homes themselves. The supermarkets and stores with the other centres, meanwhile, issue cash coupons to customers in exchange for recyclable waste. The coupons can be used at participating stores.
But what is more important is that TrEES has succeeded in providing otherwise jaded Malaysian cityfolk with a sense of green and civic consciousness, and a chance to do something to improve the urban environment.
Panikkar says she and Hashim decided to set up TrEES because ''no one was actually looking at urban problems like how to recycle waste''. She added, ''It's so easy to buy things and so easy to throw them away.'' The challenge, she says, was to find out how waste could be recycled.
In a sense, Panikkar and Hashim took an adventure into the unknown. Although they knew what they wanted TrEES to accomplish -- its mission is ''to inspire and activate environmentally sustainable lifestyles among Malaysians'' - they had little idea about how it could be done.
''When we started, we didn't know what we were getting into,'' confessed Panikkar, who recalls that days and nights quickly stretched into months just for planning and preparing for the opening of the first centre.
But fortune favoured the brave. ''Within two days of putting up flyers for the first centre,'' says Panikkar, ''people started coming in with their old newspapers''. Pannikar says she and Hashim knew then they had latched on a worthy cause.
These days, a supermarket TrEES collection centre is open three hours a week. In that time, an average of 55 people bring in some 2.5 tonnes of recyclables such as old newspapers, magazines, cardboard boxes, food tins and even phone directories.
''There's very little capital expenditure,'' says Panikkar, pointing out that she and Hashim work out of their homes and use recycled paper for correspondence. ''We don't waste money on fancy bins for our recycling centres. We look at what is sustainable.''
But TrEES is not only about mere collecting and selling. Indeed, it has already conducted in-house recycling programmes for big companies. Long-term programmes show company staff how to collect and separate office waste for recycling.
TrEES also provides environmental training workshops, talks and exhibitions for prominent Malaysian companies. These have proved so popular that they have become TrEES's main money-earner.
In addition, TrEES has been the national coordinator in Malaysia for the global 'Clean Up the World' movement. Every mid- September under this movement, more than 30 million people around the world spend a weekend trying to cleaning up surroundings.
But TrEES is up to something again. Said Panikkar: ''We are now trying to teach people about composting -- what to do with their 'veggie waste'.''
It's not as if TrEES has a lot of idle time. Recently, Clean Up the World had a Green Fest in Kuala Lumpur that Panikkar and Hashim had been preparing for over months.
They organised activities ranging from a children's art contest, the launch of a tree-planting campaign in a residential area and exhibits on organic farming, craft-making from waste materials and composting. And of course, there was a collection counter for recyclables.
''We are trying to reach out to others and work with communities,'' Panikkar said. ''It's about ordinary people trying to do something about their environment.'' (END/IPS/AP- EN/AN/CB/JS/97)
