According to NA Sujatha, Manager-Marketing of Brookefields Mall, “On weekdays (Monday to Thursday), the footfall in the mall is approximately 15, 000 per day and, on weekends (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), it can be anything like 45, 000 per day.”
How wonderful it would be if Brookefields Mall went plastic free! It would indeed considering it is the favourite haunt of all age groups and so many reputed brands have their shops there. If all of them - the shops and the customers - said NO to plastic, the outcome would be pretty amazing.
Eco-friendly cloth bags at Brookefields Mall
“But the shops have to refer such decisions to their corporate offices in order to make any changes. And sadly, we have no authority to enforce it here,” says Ashwin Balasubramaniam, COO of Brookefields. However, that has not stopped Balasubramanium and his team from persuading customers to use cloth bags instead of plastic. “Eventually it is all up to the people,” he says. “The customers can always say ‘NO’ to plastic bags. All they need to do is carry their own shopping bags and refuse the plastic ones offered.”
Balasubramanium gives a breakdown of the waste produced at the mall. “The mall produces 1,500 kg of waste per day. One hundred kilos is wet waste that is composted and donated to nurseries. Six hundred kilos is dry waste that is recycled. But the balance 800 kg of mixed waste is what we are struggling with because it is impossible to segregate. That is a huge volume and ends up in the landfill. But that will stop only if we, as the public, dispose of our waste mindfully. We have kept several bins for dry and wet waste around the mall.”
Eco-friendly cloth bags at Brookefields Mall
Efforts are on to create awareness. Of the 120-odd shops at the mall, around half have changed over to paper bags. But that still leaves the other half still hanging on to plastic and an archaic attitude. At the counter of an old and well-known brand of footwear, a customer protests the use of the plastic bag and asks why such a reputed brand has still not changed. “We don’t want to be responsible for cutting trees, and cloth bags are too expensive,” is the salesperson’s smug response. The customer speaks his mind telling the salesperson that he is well aware of the margins the footwear brand makes and stomps out.
The enormity of the crisis has obviously not sunk it as much as it should have. Some eateries still serve on plastic. Disposable paper cups with plastic lids and plastic straws are rampant. But not at iD where life-saving filter coffee is served in ceramic mugs and your dosa, idly, pongal, keerai vadai, etc. is served on the same steel plate you start off with.
Eco-friendly cloth bags at Brookefields
D. Giri Partner of Grasp Clothing (it was wonderful to see cloth bags being used in the outlet) says they are in the process of eliminating plastic bags altogether. “We still have some time to go before we completely do away with them. The cloth bags we have made are of good quality, cost us about Rs 35 per bag and they are fashionable too. In fact we kept our Grasp logo to a corner as people may not want to use a bag with advertisements on it. We are now moving over to certified decompostable bags made of starch and hope by Deepavali this year we will make the complete transition.”
And Giri reiterates what Balasubramanium says: “It is all up to the people. They must reuse cloth bags and not demand plastic bags that they will throw away.”
Green intentions
Brookfields Mall has an outreach programme called Kovai Green League in association with Bosch, WWF India, Rotary Club of Coimbatore and Suryan FM. It conducts sessions on environment protection, wealth from waste, the importance of the Western Ghats to our city, and so on. The management has also instituted the Greenest School Campus Awards to motivate children to increase green cover in their schools.
Ninety five per cent of the mall’s power comes from solar and wind energy. It has plans to double its solar capacity from the current 250 KW
It has an organic waste composter
It is in the process of shifting to LED lighting in the common areas
Carry them if you care
Brookefields gives out free cloth bags to customers who have made purchases over Rs 500. All they need to do is show their bills to the Information Desk and collect their bags. These smart carry bags bags have a story too. Women SHGs make them from recycled old clothes. The mall also conducted bag-making workshops in the atrium to show participants how to re-purpose old saris, scarves, trousers, shirts and t-shirts into bags. They were also encouraged to sell the bags they made to customers at the mall for ₹30. The proceeds from that went towards buying a sewing machine for an SHG. “About 200 bags per day are going out to mall visitors, which is a good sign and awareness about them is growing,” says Sujatha.
