KarunaNews Story

In the Indian village of Pamohi, children pay their school fees with cleaned and sorted plastic bags and bottles. Parmita Sarma co-founded Akshar Forum in 2016 with Mazin Mukhtar, an aeronautics engineer who gave up his job to work with disadvantaged families in the US before returning to India. The school converts the plastic waste into Eco Bricks, using recycling machines based on designs developed by Precious Plastic, an open source plastic recycling forum. The 100-student school collects over nine kilograms of plastic as fees every month, from which students make about 50 bricks. The students train other local schools to make Eco Bricks, and the state government has built a model childcare centre with 14,000 plastic bottles. The schools also gets students and their families to choose education over daily wage labour by awarding encashable points to students for different activities in school. The Forum has partnered with the Assam government to train government school teachers in 100 schools across the state to implement vocational training, peer-to-peer learning and plastic recycling.