Mumbai: Sion-based NGO crafts eco-brick Ganpati idol

A Sionbased nongovernmental organisation NGO called SWAN which stands for Students Women Animals and Nature is catching eyeballs with its ecobrick Ganpati idol installed at a Dharavi mandal for GaneshotsavThe bricksAn ecobrick is a plastic bottle packed with used plastic inside to a certain density so that it becomes hard like a brick These can then be used like building bricks and for making furniture like park benches desks and tables and other useful material even in big city infrastructurePradeep Francis founder SWAN said ldquoThe message through the use of ecobricks is do not litter Find some use for this plastic and reuse it so that less of it goes into our seas or landfills We do know that the stress is on less plastic of late but it is difficult to eliminate it completely The next best thing is to find ways to reuse it in our life The Divine is a powerful medium for the messagerdquo The idol is at the AKDVS Seva Mandalrsquos pandal behind Kamraj School near Hanuman Mandir at DharaviAlso ReadHow diverse cultures in Marol joined hands for a plasticfree Ganesh ChaturthiThe mediumFrancis said that SWAN started conceptualising and then creating the Ganpati idol roughly a fortnight before the Ganpati festival ldquoFor our ecobrick Ganpati idol initiative we have used 200 plastic bottles They have 50 kg of single use plastic filled inside to make ecobricks We wanted to put the idol in a mandal so that there is more public awareness about how to save the environment Besides devotion a new concept always piques the curiosity of people That means half your battle is won as the curious ask questions which need answers and answers mean giving information and spreading awarenessrdquoVisarjan plansFrancis claimed that the twoyearold NGO will ldquomost probably hold a small procession with our idol on Visarjan day which is Sunday The procession route means more people will see the idol This will happen in Matunga Sion and Dharavi Then we will pour sea water thrice from Shivaji Park beach over the idol as a symbolic Visarjan take the idol back to our Sion office and keep it or we are mulling dismantling it and using the ecobricks we havenrsquot decided definitively what wersquoll do but this is our tentative planrdquoChange rangeTwo Std XII students Ulagammal Vidhya Sundar Rajan and Nikita Venkatesan who volunteer at SWAN Foundation have made the 45 feet idol The students said ldquouse as little plastic as you can Talks about climate change ecological balance may sound daunting at first as if these concepts can only be practised by experts Yet we can make changes in small ways in our everyday life We wanted to send out this message that we can weave in change into every aspect of living The COVID19 outbreak has transformed the way we live so why not bring in this new normal as we like to term it into celebrations too The festival which is certainly curtailed in many ways this time seemed to be the right platform to send this message With so many mandals also giving online darshan we have put our revered ecobricks idol on social media too for maximum outreachrdquoConsistency keyThe SWAN Foundation volunteers were enthused by the uptick in awareness that usually peaks post visarjan with a number of people and groups including those allied to various organizations doing beach clean ups the day after visarjan A SWAN Foundation member said ldquoWe see citizen involvement and that is uplifting However consistency is key in bringing a turnaround So we want to see that there are extremely well thought out green ways to mark all festivals right from inception to the endrdquo Signing off the gladiators for green stated that warning bells are pealing across the world SWAN reminded us ldquoThere have been record floods in Europe global warming is fuelling forest fires and climate change is bringing storms that escalate into hurricanes It is time to heed this None of us can sit back and say we cannot do anything let the others fight this battle Every single one of us is a stakeholder in the race against climate changerdquo50kgQuantity of single use plastic filled in the bottles