Tag: Environment

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Reduce waste by finding another home for your old smartphone

We’ve all been liable of it. We seize the chance to purchase that glossy new smartphone and hurl the old smartphone one aside, regardless of whether that be in a garbage cabinet, in a crate in the wardrobe, or in the trash cans. While clutching that old device presumably won’t hurt any person or thing for the present, it’s surely not helping anybody either but it does not means to throw it in landfills.

You may have known discussions about the earth most of which allude to a conclusion of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Selling your old gadgets to InstaCash can contribute towards diminishing e-waste in landfills and also help used smartphones being reusable. When a gadget can’t be sold or reused, there is consistently the third alternative to recycle it. Continue reading “Reduce waste by finding another home for your old smartphone”

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7 Traditional Ways & Beliefs to Kill Environment

Our traditions have given shape to our thinking and beliefs and have made the character of our nation. We are very proud of it. However, with newer challenges increasingly facing us,which in the times to come, would turn into gargantuan proportions, if we do not mend our ways and get our acts together. This write up is a light hearted take on our ways we address the problem of E Waste traditionally with our love for hoarding and the plausible justifications we may offer!

“Update: ZeroWaste is now InstaCash”

  1. Keeping Clutter traditions Intact: To the west, cluttering is supposed to reflect the state of mind, but to us in India, it is an art, and it is our tradition. Clutter is our way of life. And we wholeheartedly subscribe to Einstein view. “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
  2. Now that great minds also affirm our way of life how can we empty our houses of clutter? Einstein or no Einstein, we known long before anybody could point us, right from our childhood that we are foresighted, and we plan ahead. We always save for the event when our clutter one day would rescue the need to go out and buy a new part or a spare. So clutters in our homes are for great reasons.
  3. Stick to Stacking: We have it in us, all programmed in our genes. Thus we stack. We stack up groceries before the budget is announced, we stack petrol at the midnight before price hike and we are known globally to stack up gold in shimmering million tones. Traditionally we have been a nation of stackers, stacking every banal item which has long lost its significance in our lives. Thus we have our natural reasons for what makes us what we are.
  4. Practice Utilitarian Creativity: To most of us it is sacrilegious to give away even our most unused dilapidated, several generations over, discarded house hold stuffs. We have honed the skills to turn them into utility, to fit inside our 20 X20 spaces. Our old refrigerators metamorphose into cabinets for scrap or raddi. Cables and wires become the stethoscopes in our children role playing acts, the batteries become paper weights. We turn the scraps into utility and at times into abstract art. Salvador Dali would have loved to be born as an Indian.
  5. Live the Present: For a nation wanting to long-jump into development, our advice is Stack before You Leap. Healthy life and environment clean air and Swachh Bharat are too distant ideal. We need to concentrate on the present, Stack Up for the Future!
  6. Belief in Our Karma: They tell us the earth is getting less green because we stack. Now can somebody tell us how our stacking lead to environment pollution? Our parents stacked, their parents stacked and for innumerable generations we have stacked. Nothing changed because of the hoarding, stashing and stacking. How then we still have good air to breathe ample water coming into our taps. Our Children then must stack. The environment if it is turning grey from green, it is ordained to be such. Our karma has resulted into our present living condition. If the fate of our children has something in store which is different than green then it would be to purify them from past karma.
  7. Philanthropy is good for Economy: We do our philanthropic bit by giving the kabbadi wala some of our stuffs. It becomes his livelihood. He has his small place where he burns the stuffs into something which the big scarp dealers buy from him. These Scrap dealers then do something which they pass on to someone and that someone passes on to some other one. So our philanthropic stuff makes money for all and adds to the economy. But whatever it does to the ecology is not our concern. By the end of the day we feel happy for the little kabaddi wala.
  8. All Merge into One: What the kabbadi wala cannot sell goes into his stacks or goes for burning or into severs or drains or rivers or rivulets. Or close to our cities for landfills. What we had extracted from the Earth goes back to the Mother Nature. For all things will eventually merge into her sooner or later. Our efforts seem small, polluting but it finally ends into the beginning. This is our belief!

Note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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Phone-throw and junk-dunk: Games to fight E-WASTE

How far can you throw your old mobile phone to save the environment?

“Update: ZeroWaste is now InstaCash”

Throwing away old and unused electronics as rubbish or scrap is the beginning of the e-waste problem. It’s a big problem. How do you tell everyone that throwing is bad? Simple. Get them to throw their old and unused mobile phones for a good cause. That’s precisely what Jaipur based startup ZeroWaste did with their “Phone Throwing Championship” and “Junk Dunk” Tournament at the recently concluded tech-fest PLINTH 2015 at LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur.

Phone throwing is simple. ZeroWaste asked participants to bring their old/unused phones and throw them as far as they could or as uniquely as they wished. For safety while throwing the phones were wrapped up tightly with Cellotape so that they wouldn’t shatter and litter the ground. Winners were chosen on the basis of maximum distance thrown (just as in any athletic competition like discus, shot put and javelin or the old school favourite –cricket ball throw).

ZW collected all the phones used by the participants, paid cash rewards for theirold phones and made a 5 min presentation on how a simple decision to exchange your waste/unused/old electronics items for cash at an authorized ewaste collection outlet (ZW has 30+ centers) can make a huge difference to the fight against e-waste in India.

About 500 participants tried their hands at Phone Throw and 3 winners were chosen in each Men, Women and Freestyle categories. While the winners were rewarded with Goodies and T-Shirts, poor performers were “dared” by spectators to do something embarrassing, wacky, funny or all three!

Since E-Waste is not just about mobile phones, ZW invented a unique game called Junk-Dunk. Basically it is Basketball with 4 baskets that we made out of Junk washing machines. Each team had two baskets to shoot at and two to defend. Small tinkering with rules and people went crazy, playing for hours without break.

Participants pledged to join hands with ZeroWaste in making Jaipur the first E-waste free city in the country. Student delegate from Brazil, Pedro Rorato, admitted that like India, Brazil is also lacking the required e-waste recycling ecosystem and public awareness is the key to ensure 100% recycling.

Indians currently generates about 1.5 Million tonnes of waste electronics annually and it will rise exponentially as India bridges its “Digital Divide”. Sensing higer demand for cheap consumer electronics, companies are flooding the market with “designed to dump” products having shorter life and low-grade plastics.

ZeroWaste is upbeat about spreading the word of “buy one recycle one” to millions of Indians who enjoy the fun of modern electronics and technology upgrades but are clueless when it comes to understanding how the ewaste problem is a time bomb ticking under our very noses.

Says Prateek Goel and Sunil Saradhna, founders of ZeroWaste, “We hope to organise a state level and then a national phone throwing event in the coming year and generate huge awareness about responsible e-waste disposal especially among teenagers and youth.”

Way to go !!

To know more Connect with us today at info@getinstacash.in | www.getinstacash.in

Note: This post was originally published in February 2015 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.