You don't have to be a grown-up to solve your problems, you just have to be driven enough to fix it. That's what the fifth-grade students of Government Public School in Secunderabad proved. When they gathered for their morning meeting, their teacher and mentor — Santosh Kumar Dinne briefed them about the student-led Be The Change project and asked them to come up with challenges in the community. Since the kids noticed animals and their pets dying from eating plastic, most of them wanted to work on upcycling single-use plastic. It was decided — they'd make eco-bricks and since their classroom doesn't have a table for their teachers, they planned to make a table and a chair.
The students have taken this up as their Dasara holiday homework and spent their holidays collecting plastic. They went back to school with 30 eco-bricks, which weren't enough so they went back hunting for more. Santosh took them through several video tutorials and they formulated different designs. After several trials and errors of stacking the bottles up, gluing them together, they figured out a solution. Just so you know — 1KG amounts to 500 plastic bags, which means the kids have collected some thousands of plastic bags for this project.
Around 38 kids were involved in this project, and they've made a chair and a table out of plastic. It can take up to 90KG of weight — yup, that's right! In fact, the kids have danced and jumped on them to look into the amount of pressure or stress they can take. This project was also displayed at the KER (Kids Education Revolution) Regional Summit by Teach For India.