BIMTECH becomes first plastic-free private B School campus

Greater Noida (21/08/2019) : Birla Institute of Management Technology, Greater Noida has always remained a step ahead when it comes to CSR activities. The institute gives special attention to the issues like environment and development of Greater Noida region. This time the management institute has added one more feather to its cap by making the campus almost free of plastic. Professor K R Chari is the man behind this commendable achievement accomplished by the institute.

Professor Chari is an engineer by profession who has almost four-decade of work experience in the Industry sector. For the last 10 years, he has been associated with BIMTECH and is sharing his experience with the students. As he has a special love for nature and environment, so since very long he has been working on plastics wastes and converting them into useful products.

In an exclusive interview with Ten News the professor talked about how he made the BIMTECH campus free of plastic. During the interaction, he said “When I joined back in 2009 I found that use of plastic materials like water bottles, disposable glasses and other daily use products that have packaging of plastics are getting extensively used in the campus premises, making it dirty. So I approached our director Dr. Harivansh Chaturvedi and discussed the issue with him, and he eventually allowed me to take corrective measures for reducing the use of plastic.

First I found that the kiosk which we have in our campus, from where students purchase their daily use stuff is providing them polythene as carry bags. So first of all I replaced it with a jute bag but soon after the number of bags reduced as some students took them back home. Then I came up with a new idea and asked the students to use a brown envelope costing one rupee each to which they resisted saying that it will be an extra burden on their pockets. But later somehow I managed to made them agree by changing the cost of the envelope to 1 rupee, out of which 50 paisa they have to pay and 50 paisa will be paid by the management. This is how I restricted the use to polythene in the campus.

In the second phase, I replaced the disposable water bottles with glass water bottles. These bottles are costly but still our management supported the move. In the initial phases, our staff also expressed their problems as glass bottles are needed to be washed after use. So, we hired extra staff but didn’t change our decision. So now in most of the events, we use glass bottles instead of regular plastic bottles. Now, we also have washing machines for cleaning bottles.

At present, we only allow plastic bottles in one or two mega-events like orientation and convocation as in such mass gathering events, glass bottles are not feasible. Similarly, in our cafeteria also we replaced disposable plates with steel utensils and copper glass. So this is how by taking some major steps we had made our campus 99% free of plastic use. 

At last, answering a question of whether BIMTECH is taking any initiative to make other colleges of this region aware of such campaigns. He said, “For now we didn’t but representatives of three colleges had approached me saying that they heard that BIMTECH is having a campaign or something, so it means awareness is spreading and we are very glad about it.”