Bring Plastic Waste if You Want to Study, School Tells Kids

A small school in India’s northeastern Assam state found a unique way to educate kids to take care of the environment: students have to “pay” for tuition with plastic waste they collect.

Each of the 110 students at the Akshar Forum School must bring about 20 plastic items to school each week in order to attend. Every week school children aged 4 to 15 line up in front of the school with grocery bags full of plastic bottles, plastic straws and other non-reusable products.

Philanthropists Parmita Sarma and Mazin Mukhtar started the Akshar primary school in June of 2016 in Pamohi, Assam, at the foot of the Himalayas. A key moment that inspired the school’s founding couple to focus on recycling was when the school’s classrooms filled with toxic fumes resulting from the burning of plastic waste by people wanting to keep warm during the winter.

Previously school attendance was free of charge. The founders started the ‘plastic fee’ initiative after a request for parents to participate in a recycling program had failed. “The use of plastics is rampant across Assam,” said Parmita Sarma to AFP. The founders say that the project is helping to raise awareness in the community.