It’s fitting that I meet members of ROB (Reclaim Our Beaches) at the caressing shores of Besant Nagar beach. A motley group of seven sitting in a circle introduce me to a movement that began three years ago. “We don’t do beach clean-ups anymore,” says Siddharth Hande, one of its founders, much to my surprise. So what do they do now? “Clean-ups aren’t solutions. You pick up the waste here and dump it in Palliakarnai or somewhere else. We’re looking at learning about waste and how to manage it.”
Siddharth is now an urban geographer and, along with founding-member Kaushik Subramaniam, works with his core group of about 15 members to make a difference. “We’re a non-hierarchical initiative that makes decisions democratically. We do have a core group of active members but the rest are a floating crowd. They always join us for our campaigns or symposiums but don’t work with us,” says Kaushik, who now works as a programmer.
Kaushik and a group of others met Siddharth at a concert, where they decided to do something about Chennai’s beaches. “We all live around this area and we hang out at the Besant Nagar beach a lot. Hence, we decided we’d look out for our beaches,” he adds, “We were about ten people who began this and the first thing we did was to segregate the beach into 108 segments and try to calculate the waste collection in each segment.”
After this began the beach clean-ups that ROB became popular for. “We launched the ROB concert and went on one clean-up where we collected trash and made a monument out of it, just to show people the amount of garbage being thrown around. We called it the ‘Right Clean-up’. In January 2010, we did a Zero Waste Celebration at Urrur Kuppam where we conducted games and activities for two days.”
ROB also conducted an ‘Adopt a Baby’ campaign where groups from different colleges would visit the Broken Bridge every week and learn to care for the mangroves there. “Most of the trash you find at Broken Bridge is not from there but what the Adyar river brings with it. We want people to see this, clean it up and learn to protect the mangroves.”
After their first waste audit, ROB had some interesting finds. In Elliot’s Beach alone, ROB found 663 unique particles of which 557 were food and beverage items. “We found things like thermocol, sandals and paintings.” And the next year we did the same audit and found that despite our weekly clean-ups, the amount of garbage hadn’t decreased.” Where is all the garbage coming from? This is the question ROB hopes to find out. “Clean-ups aren’t solutions. Our major clean-ups have pulled in nearly 700 people. You go green for an hour then go back to being a consumer. But we want to deal with issues of consumption and packaging,” says Siddharth.
Now, ROB has taken a turn from clean-ups and has held two symposiums on the issue of waste with environmentalists and ecologists such as Nityanand Jayaram, Dunu Roy and Annie Leonard (Story of Stuff) taking part.
ROB is now planning to start a ‘freecycling’ group online, where any product or skill can be used for free. “If you don’t need something, just put it up on the page and someone else who needs it can use it. The same way, if you can repair a bicycle, someone may be able to use that skill,” says Siddharth.
“We don’t want to fit into a particular category like beach clean-ups because we support a lot more causes. We’ve held an ‘Unclear Energy Concert’ in protest of Kudankulam, a Democrazy concert the proceeds of which went to help the victims of Mettur, Cuddalore, Kodaikanal and Bhopal tragedies, and also participated in the campaign against the Elevated Expressway, a couple of years back,” says Kaushik, while Siddharth adds, “We don’t go about giving out solutions. Waste is an economy by itself and our definitions are so narrow. ROB wants to be a peer space that is critical about how we go green. ROB is a journey.”
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ROB’s road so far…
*Beach Cleanups
*Adopt a baby campaign
*Waste audit in Besant Nagar Beach
* Democrazy concert
* Unclear Energy Concert
* Campaign against the elevated express highway
* ROB symposium
