HCCB in partnership with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and various other NGOs and local municipalities, launched the ‘Plastic Lao, Thaila Pao’, a multi-city social awareness campaign, in October 2019.
Designed as a barter system, the campaign encourages everyone to bring all kinds of plastic waste products to the mini material recovery stalls set up in different locations and get recycled cloth bags as per the exchange rates defined. As such, people are given one cloth bag for each set of 10 PET bottles, 10 pieces of mixed plastic products, 20 pieces of multi-layered plastics, (of at least 100 gms and above), 20 small mixed plastic products or 15 pieces of plastic bags (of normal size of 1-2 kg carrying capacity). The campaign also drives home the point that plastics have inherent value and they need to be recovered and recycled.
The cities covered in the first phase included New Delhi, Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Kolkata covering 9 locations. The second phase will soon be kicked off in 2020 across Goa, Jodhpur, Aurangabad, Mumbai and Chennai.
The ‘Plastic Lao, Thaila Pao’ campaign is aimed at communicating that plastics have inherent value and can be recycled. The key objective is to bring about behavioural change needed to responsibly segregate waste at source as a first step for recycle of plastic waste.
In sync with Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission, the ‘Plastic Lao, Thaila Pao’ campaign is part of HCCB’s ongoing effort to create an end-to-end recycling ecosystem starting at the point of waste generation and connecting to the recyclers thereby creating a Circular Economy on plastics. In cities, where Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages does not have its own swachhata kendras, it partners with NGOs who not only collect these post-use consumer plastics including the multi-layered plastic wastes but also recycle them into useful products in an environmentally sustainable manner.
In an effort to raise awareness against the use of single use plastic and encourage the use of sustainable materials, HCCB had distributed 22,000 cotton bags at the experience centres which were set up in 4 of its factories (Ameenpur, Siliguri, Chittoor and Goblej) during 2019-20.
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