Zero Waste Interview Series - Thanal, Kerala, India

An interview of the director of the Kerala-based organisation, Thanal, for an upcoming documentary on waste. Some excerpts:

"If you look at fifty years behind [in India], and you look at our villages and cities, the way we lived, we never had things to waste....Our extraction from the Earth was very little, what we used was very little...and then, in the last twenty-twenty five years, what has happened is that industrialisation has come in so much, that now people are not living in a way that they need to....We are lured by materials that we may actually never have needed. But now we feel that it's all needed. So the whole marketing is, 'How can you live without plastics?' You are asking this question to humanity which has thousands of years of living in this world without plastics, and then in the last thirty to fifty years you introduce plastics, you get them caught in the use of it, and then you're asking the question, "How can you live without plastics?" I think it's a completely stupid question."

"...There are millions and millions of species of animals, plants, all sorts of living organisms in this world, and there's not one creature which is wasting. It's only the human being which is wasting things....So it's all the more responsibility on us, that we don't create a world that can't handle these things, organically. That is the underlying philosophy behind zero waste."

"...If everybody in India wants to live like the Americans, then you will need two or three or four Earths. But the thing is that you just have one Earth....With this kind of a limitation, you cannot go ahead with this kind of an economic approach at all. That is where we need to change. We cannot keep saying that 'you go ahead, buy more cars, eat more, drink more.' You just can't keep saying that, whereas our education is now continuously trying to say that: 'The more you consume, the better you are a citizen.' That is not at all right. The approach has to be the reverse at some point of time, and we think zero waste is one of the ways we start reversing this approach."

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Zero
• Waste
• Kerala
• Ecology
• Deer
• Park
• Institute
• waste
• consumption
• plastics

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