One of the goals of this project is to use materials that are considered garbage for many people and turn them into something playful. If we analyse these things from a different perspective and sort out what we find in the”garbage” we can find plastic, glass, paper, rubber, organic matter, cloth, batteries, etc. Conveniently, in Sadhana Forest we already divide these materials into separate dust bins and store them so we can recycle them. It can seem pretty normal if you are in Europe or North America, but here in India separating garbage is really something new. There are no dust bins, and people have not figured out what to do with the garbage that they produce. These materials are polluting the environment and can take more than 10 years to disappear from streets, roads, rivers, oceans and especially the land that people and plants and animals live on. In India, garbage is everywhere; people throw things out the doors of their houses, through the windows of the train, the bus, the rickshaw… leaving the streets and land covered with materials that cannot decompose and go back into the earth.
Because of this, in Childrens Land we are looking for new, creative solutions, ways to transform the world positively using the imagination and to make the space playful and safe. We are exploring how the kids can learn these new skills of recycling using our garbage, what we have in our store room and what they can find around their houses.
First plan was: a playground! First material to recycle: a tire from an old truck! One kid was the hero of the day; he brought this big tire with his bicycle all the way from Koot Road, about 3 kms away from Childrens Land. The kids decided they wanted to paint it and hang it in a tree and make a second swing in the area.
It was easy and we had a lot of fun doing it, but it was just the beginning! The playground will continue to be built over time, with more materials we find and more ideas that come from the kids.
Second plan was: we need a seat to play the drums! (its too hard on the ground). So we made a bench with plastic bottles (filled with sand) and some clay. We took about one hundred plastic botlles that we had collected, filled them with sand, and made layers like you do to build a house with bricks, only instead of cement we used clay from the mud pool.
This is the best option for us, to combine natural materials that we find around us with the garbage, that when you separate becomes such an amazing source of other materials to make our world a beautiful place. We just need to find how to use them, have new ideas and solutions; this is what we are doing in Childrens Land. Lets make the world a magical place! Keep giving, keep receiving, keep growing.
