Low power, high charge: Teen leads e-waste drive

After suffering from bronchitis due to the harmful smoke from the Deonar dumping yard last year, 15-year-old Mumbai resident Nishant Jain started collecting dry cell batteries to recycle them.

The initiative, which Jain first started at his school and residential society, has now spread to 17 schools in the city and five residential buildings in his Ghatkopar neighbourhood.

Speaking about why he started the initiative and how he managed to spread the word, Jain said, “The health issues which I faced made me think about the cause of the fire and solutions at a basic level. The batteries contain chemicals and when they come in contact with heat, they explode. It takes time to collect the dry batteries because their charge doesn’t dry daily. Initially, I used to collect these at my school, Poddar International, and then I slowly spread the word in three other schools. Later, with the help of NGO Children’s Movement For Civic Awareness (CMCA), we managed to present the initiative to 13 private schools in the city. The students responded positively by collecting as many dry batteries as possible.”

According to research, India consumes around 2.5 billion batteries every year. While starting the initiative, Jain had placed a used plastic jar to collect the batteries, but the response was so good that some schools kept additional jars to be able to collect more.

According to Jain, schools like St John the Baptist High School at Thane, Navy Children School at Colaba, Sanjivani International School at Kharghar have been actively participating to collect e-waste.

Jain has trained more than 50 people including school students and volunteers from CMCA to carry forward the initiative in other schools. “To create a greater impact of recycling e-waste and especially dry batteries, I would like to take this initiative to civic-run schools. There are many BMC-run schools in the city that can help create awareness and collect large numbers of batteries,” said Jain. “The most challenging job is to make people aware about recycling rather than collecting. While we managed to collect 4 kg batteries in my society within two months, it took us a few months to collect over 15 kg batteries in the first four schools.”

Social media has helped him to keep in touch with students who volunteer to collect batteries in their schools.  

“While platforms like Twitter and Facebook have helped me spread the message, WhatsApp groups have helped me stay connected with school students to keep an update about the quantity of batteries collected every month,” said Jain.