Hyderabad: Plastic bottle crushers installed at select railway stations

In a bid to protect the environment, South Central Railways has installed machines for crushing and recycling plastic bottles at select stations in Hyderabad.

The installations have been made at Kachiguda, Secunderabad and Nizamabad stations along with Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh.

These crusher machines are of the size of a refrigerator and have the capacity to crush around 5000 bottles per day.

The crushed bottles come out as fine plastic pieces, ready to be sold as scrap in the market or to be reused to make bags and T-shirts.

"The aim to install these machines is to protect the environment. If any passenger wants to throw the plastic water bottle they can put into this machine, which will crush the water bottle," Chief Public Relations Officer of South Central Railways, Uma Shankar told ANI.

Not only are initiatives being taken to prevent littering, but measures are being implemented to discourage the use of plastic itself.

Earlier this month, the Telangana government instructed municipal bodies across the state to stop the usage of plastic.

Moreover, guidelines were issued to discontinue the usage of single-use plastic items, like plastic and tetra bottles, single-use straws, plastic/styrofoam tea cups/containers, plastic below 50 microns or plastic coated items and any other forms of single-use /banned plastic.