It was the ‘Joy of Giving Week’ (Daan Utsav) and students of the Department of Psychology, PSG College of Arts and Science, Coimbatore, like many others, were all geared up to bring a smile on the face of those in need. But this time around, the giving was planned not only to benefit the deprived, but also the environment, and encourage a different kind of donation.
They were successful in motivating fellow students to set Blackle — the black version of the Google search engine — as their default homepage throughout the week. Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. Hence, every time they loaded their web browser, they saved energy.
Using old newspaper, students made thousands of custom-made pouches and distributed them to households to encourage women to wrap and dispose off used sanitary napkins. The pouches came with a jumping clip in answer to a plea by sanitary workers and garbage collectors who had to pick unwrapped used sanitary napkins. Smaller paper pouches were given to a community pharmacy to enable them to distribute medicines.
What was most interesting was the Greensole initiative, a self-sustaining social venture that recycles discarded sports shoes, through which students understood the significance of donating old shoes. Here, old shoes would be refurbished into comfortable open footwear (slippers) and given to those in need.
Assistant Professor, of the Department of Psychology K.P. Naachimuthu, stumbled upon Greensole in 2015 when he was looking to do a case study. Impressed by their work, he decided to involve his students in it and used the opportunity of ‘Daan Utsav’ to do so.
Greensole, started in 2014 by national level athletes Shriyans Bhandari and Ramesh Dhami, has so far provided more than 10,000 pairs of footwear to those in need.
According to Shriyans, crores of shoes are discarded every year and each pair takes hundreds of years to decompose, adding to the landfills. Yet, a sizeable population of India cannot afford footwear.
“The concept is spreading among school and college students, besides corporate, who are turning donors and giving us used shoes. It costs Rs. 199 to refurbish an old shoe. At the moment we are making nearly 3,000 pairs a month. But we have the wherewithal to make many thousands,” says Shriyans.
Third-year student-donor S. Devishree is all smiles as she described how they explained the concept and collected shoes. She concurs that her Department students were taken aback when they heard about Greensole. They were also apprehensive about asking for old shoes, which was an unusual thing to donate.
But slowly, as the word spread, they were surprised by the response they got. “Now, after collecting nearly 300 pairs of shoes, we feel it is more meaningful than asking for cash,” she says.
Students have also arranged to send the shoes to Mumbai through a courier service which has volunteered to do so without a fee.