TERI conference: Deliberations on waste management

A day long conference was organised to mark the culmination of joint initiative of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and Tetra Pak India on waste management and sustainable consumption which is an important Sustainable Development Goal (SDG12).
'Borjan: A New Dawn' witnessed speakers and participants from across the country deliberating on and evaluating their learnings and experiences from Project SEARCH - a collaborative initiative launched in 2009 to inculcate the habit of sustainable consumption and recycling among the next generation.
Since its inception, Project SEARCH (which stands for Sensitisation, Education and Awareness on Recycling for a Cleaner Habitat), has been implemented in more than 200 schools in Delhi NCR, Chandigarh, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Goa and Bengaluru.

A TERI statement said that in the seventh year, the initiative influenced approximately 3,00,000 students, teachers, principals, and the community at large.
In the seven years of its operation, the initiative has reached out to over a million students through an array of non-formal teaching methods.
In this period, more than 150 tonnes of dry waste have also been collected for responsible recycling, TERI said.

"Children and the youth play a crucial role in behavioural change and shift towards sustainability.
"While we conclude our project today we leave behind over a million trained and sensitised young soldiers championing sustainable consumption and sustainable lifestyle and they in the years to come will be the influence and change that we want to see in society," said Annapurna Vancheswaran, Senior Director at TERI.

The ceremony 'Borjan: A New Dawn' was conducted to mark the next level of the programme where member schools will take the learnings of Project SEARCH beyond the school boundaries, reaching out to societies and RWAs.
"We are extremely proud to have partnered with TERI to reach out to the community and to students in particular to inculcate the habit of recycling, waste management and sustainable consumption.
"The principles that Project SEARCH espouses aligns perfectly with the work that Tetra Pak has been doing over the past decade in promoting the recycling of our paper-based carton packaging while encouraging responsible consumption," said Tetra Pak South Asia Markets Communications Director Jaideep Gokhale.