Something Positive: The School Where Students Pay With Plastic Bags | An Encouraging Development

On a misty Thursday morning in the village of Pamohi in the northeast Indian state of Assam, children walk to school carrying two bags. One holds their books; the other contains 25 cleaned and sorted plastic bags and bottles. For these students, the latter is currency — their school, the Akshar Forum, a 100-student institution established in 2016, accepts plastic as tuition fees.

When the kids arrive at school, they queue patiently, chattering among themselves as they wait their turn to deposit their weekly “fees.”

“I wonder why, across Pamohi, people still don’t segregate their waste,” 15-year-old Piyush Kalita muses. “If only we figured out how to dispose of plastic properly, life would be very different.”

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Kalita is right. Assam currently faces a huge plastic waste disposal problem. Its capital, Guwahati, produces 500 metric tons of waste every day, of which less than a third is processed. The rest suppurates in landfills, leaching toxins and microplastics into the environment — or worse, is burned by those with few other options to generate warmth during the harsh winters.

Parmita Sarma, who co-founded Akshar Forum in 2016 with Mazin Mukhtar, an aeronautics engineer who gave up his job to work with disadvantaged families in the U.S. before returning to India, came up with a solution to the region’s plastic crisis: “Instead of waiving the tuition fee in our school, we decided to take it in the form of plastic waste,” she says.

The world over, there are projects that assign value to plastic, creating a financial incentive for communities to collect and keep the material out of the environment. Social enterprise Plastic Bank, which launched in Haiti and now also has branches across Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and Cameroon, incentivizes communities to collect plastic from ecologically-fragile zones in return for tokens that can be cashed in for money or food. They then sell recycled plastic to be used in packaging. New Jersey-based recycling business Terracycle helps schools raise funds by getting students to collect and recycle waste. And in Lagos, Nigeria, Morit International School accepts plastic bottles in lieu of tuition fees from underprivileged students.

However, plastics are practically indestructible, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that 300 million tons of plastic waste is generated annually. What’s more, says the UNEP, only 9 percent of the plastic waste ever generated has been recycled to date, and only 14 percent is collected for recycling now. The long-term sustainability of projects that monetize plastic therefore depends on how efficiently they are able to recycle and reuse it. Some reports suggest that Morit International School is literally drowning in the “fees” it has collected.

All their recycling machines are based on designs developed by Precious Plastic, an online, open source plastic recycling forum. Presently, school principal Akanchha Dubey estimates that they collect over nine kilograms of plastic as fees every month, from which students are able to make about 50 bricks.

“The idea is that plastic is precious, if we find a good way to monetize it,” Akshar co-founder Sarma says. “But that’s not where we are now, as we don’t really have a steady market for them.”

On the bright side, the process is teaching students about recycling plastic and its environmental cost. “I can’t get over how many bags we’re able to fill in a single plastic bottle,” Kalita exclaims. “At least by doing this we’re preventing some of it from being burned.”

Now others are following suit. Akshar’s students train local schools to make Eco Bricks, and Kalita was recently part of a team that travelled to Ladakh, 1,000 miles away, to teach students in a Himalayan school how to repurpose their plastic waste. The Assam government is likewise promoting the use of Eco Bricks, and has built a model anganwadi (government-run childcare centre) with 14,000 plastic bottles. Their plan to build 100 such structures across the state could give plastic recycling a larger push than Akshar’s effort.

Meanwhile, Akshar Forum is continuously refining not just its plastic recycling practice but its teaching model, part of an attempt to combat a problem that potentially has impacts as far-reaching as plastic pollution — school drop-out rates.

When Sarma and Mukhtar were conceptualizing the school of their dreams, the poverty in Pamohi and, indeed, the state was an obstacle. Assam’s per capita income stood at just over 100,000 rupees (about $1,145) compared to neighboring state Sikkim’s 470,000 plus rupees (about $5,300) in 2021 to 2022. Sarma, who was born in Pamohi to a politician father and social worker mother, was raised to value the importance of public service. “I was convinced that the only way out of poverty is through education,” she says. “We needed to incentivize students and their families to choose the long-term gains that education provides, over the short-term gains of daily wage labour.”

Working together, Sarma and Mukhtar decided to award encashable points to students for different activities in school, such as teaching junior students, helping teachers manage classrooms and undergoing vocational training. Today, students are incentivized to learn more, do more and earn more. They get up to 35 points an hour during vocational training, which includes solar panel installation, mobile repairing, tailoring, carpentry and landscaping. Recently, when the electrical wiring on campus needed to be changed, students were able to do it themselves.

Kalita, meanwhile, is learning first aid and gets to use his skills in the clinic on campus. “I like helping people in need, people in pain,” he says. “Now I dream of becoming a doctor when I’m older.”

Affiliated with the National Institute of Open Schooling, the school enables each student to learn at their own pace by replacing classes and grades with learning levels. This, along with the encashable points system, makes “a teacher out of every student” — in the words of English, business studies and computer science teacher Yuvraj Haloi — and has helped the school to reduce drop-out rates drastically.

For Sarma, funding for all this is a constant source of worry. But the Akshar model, a modern, green twist on the Gandhian Nai Taleem (New Education) system which integrates education with work, is in line with the National Education Policy that was unveiled in 2020. Government assessments of Akshar Forum and similar schools across the country have paved the way for Prime Minister Modi’s PM SHRI schools: 14,500 institutions designed to be modern, sustainable and skill-focused. The Forum has partnered with the Assam government to train government school teachers in 100 schools across the state. Depending on the speed of uptake, Sarma and her team take about 30 months to train these schools to implement vocational training, peer-to-peer learning and plastic recycling.

Meanwhile, Sarma is already thinking of how to secure more funds to expand beyond these 100 schools. “The problem in the nonprofit sector is that funders expect quick results,” she says, but the impact of these schools cannot be easily gauged in the short-term, except through individual success stories.

Hearteningly, individual success stories are there many. Haloi reminisces about Raja, a student who previously dropped out of school to work in a quarry with his parents. “We convinced his parents to let him return to school, and now he has passed class 10 and is a vocal plastic recycling ambassador,” Haloi says.

And Kalita, who has become much more careful about using plastic, says that the trip to train students how to reduce plastic waste in Ladakh has been a highlight of his life to date. “It felt great. I felt as if I was doing my bit.”

Scrolling photos courtesy of Akshar Foundation.