A beautiful one-room structure with coloured star motif will soon serve as the headquarters for the Mamlatdar office of Pavi Jetpur taluka that will spearhead the administration's various plans to prevent use of single-use plastic. In a spin though, the structure has been built by filling up 8,500 plastic bottle collected by school children of 50 schools in the district; the bottom-end of the bottle makes for the star motif. In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind initiative, the district administration — through the collector's office — gave children empty plastic bottles and asked them to fill it up with plastic waste like wrappers and sand. Then with the help of engineers, they constructed the room right in the Mamlatdar office to spread the message of the harm that plastic does. "Scrap vendors in the district donated the bottles. The children themselves got some of the bottles and we asked them to fill it up," said Mayur Parmar, Deputy Collector of Chhota Udepur. Explaining the need to fill up the bottle with sand, he said it was imperative to ensure that the bottles don't crush under their own weight when put to use in construction, adding, "The small house that we have built can last for at least two decades. Moreover, the main motive was to encourage children to collect plastic waste and to create awareness about the ill effects of plastic use." Parmar said that since they wanted to build a room out of the plastic bottles, they stuck to 1 litre and 500 ml bottles. "It was to maintain uniformity and to ensure the structure was sound," said Parmar. The structure cost barely Rs 15,000 to build and the response has been so encouraging that the District Rural Development Agency is also mulling to construct similar structures under the MGNREGA programme.

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