Hi! It's my pleasure to introduce Sanjay Gupta. In this module, he will present the case of a public awareness campaign in India. Sanjay Gupta, the floor is yours! Thanks, Chris. This is the story of a campaign in a 1 million plus city called Coimbatore in India, where a mass awareness program was organized for improving segregation and recycling using the Guinness World Record as motivation. My name is Dr. Sanjay K. Gupta and I work with the SKAT Consulting in Switzerland, and I provided the key conceptual and strategic guidelines for conducting this campaign. Most of us know that getting people to participate in waste segregation and recycling practices is often a big challenge. We also know that typically, awareness campaigns are activities organized by either municipalities or NGOs as a one-time affair. So, there are awareness campaigns for short term gains and there are awareness campaigns which sell a vision to entire community. In this module, I would like to present an example of such a campaign where a vision was shared with a large community. It is called the Coimbatore Guinness Championship Campaign 2015. The attempt was made as part of achieving the Guinness World Record for largest recycling lesson at a single venue. As I stated, Coimbatore region in India is one of the most industrialized cities in South India. It is the second largest city and urban agglomeration in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is the eleventh largest state and the second largest economy in India. Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation, or CCMC as it is popularly called, has taken several steps to improve solid waste resource management system in compliance with the municipal waste management and handling rules. Though CCMC has good infrastructure for waste management, it did not spark source segregation and recycling. Resource recovery was at a mere 6% due to lack of awareness, training of collection crews and absence of appropriate collection methods. As the world is moving toward 3R principles of reduce, reuse, and recycle, CCMC envisioned a unique campaign to bring awareness and do capacity building of all stakeholders including municipal staff, citizens, civil society organizations, with a key emphasis on students at the schools and colleges. Its objective was to create a more sustainable solid waste management system focusing on resource recovery and recycling. And Guinness Book of World Records was used as an attraction and motivation for the community to be part of this history, and it mainly targeted the next generation of ten to 18 year old students as the change agents; and it was an attempt at a culture and behavior change initiative to get community stakeholders aligned with the new waste management system of the city. As you can see, the campaign organizers shared the vision with a range of stakeholders. You can see all the logos of those organizers which were part of it, ranging from elected representatives to industry, market associations, resident associations, local NGOs. And they were able to garner the maximum support. Many of them also pitched in financial contributions to support the campaign besides their own time and voluntary work. And many of these had never partnered with municipality or contributed financially, but this time they did after setting the regional waste management services for the city. The Guinness campaign event was widely publicized through various media including print, banners, leaflets, radio, local television, website, SMS, Whatsapp group, mobile missed calls, on and offline registration forms. Whatsapp group messages and radio turned out to be very effective mediums to make people aware on what is going on. As the campaign got closer, the publicity was intensified to capture the attention of the public, again using the same mediums and constant and consistent reminders were sent through SMS and Whatsapp messages and also it included mobile vans that went around the city informing the public about this campaign. Here we see the commissioner of Coimbatore explaining the rules for setting up this Guinness Book of World Records. The event was conducted as per the stringent rules of the Guinness Book of World Records through video recording of all evidences. It had also an independent team of qualified auditors for physically verifying each and every aspect of the attempt before declaring the results. Here we see a massive turnout of students and participants queuing up to enter the hall, to attend the recycling lesson session. The participants' entry was video recorded with electronic barcode machines and mobile apps and the final electronic count of participants stood at 12,994. The lesson plan was designed for 45 minutes divided into four distinct interactive sessions. These are some of the snapshots of the largest recycling lesson in progress. The methodology included visual slide presentations on large LED screens, verbal instructions from facilitators, and demonstrations which were live streamed. Interactivity was built in to ensure participation and a set of activity flash cards that were given to the participants. This was followed by explaining what is the methodology of CCMC that has adopted to collect waste in a very source-segregated manner from the households. A practical demonstration of the post card with all the segregation systems was put there.That you can see in picture three and four of this slide. This, you can see another picture of the largest recycling lesson in progress. The first part of the session was an icebreaker through a funny anecdote involving Yamarāja or the god of death according to Indian mythology. As the caretaker of Hell, Yamarāja is faced with a space crunch and he tries to find another plug and play space for hell, and he stumbles upon dump sites in the country which are even worse than hell, to punish those who commit sins. He describes the current behavior of waste management by people as sins and the dump sites as hell on Earth. The participants were to answer, "Where the hell, or the dump sites, are in their city and what is the name of that hell, or the place, the dump site?" The second part was an interactive session of see, do and check activity that's learning for identifying different major streams into organics, inorganics and hazardous to provide a clear understanding of the segregation. From the set of colorful pictures and flashcards, the participants identified types of waste which needs to be put in appropriate bins. A formative assessment was built into the session plan to check the correctness of their choice and learn from their own mistakes, if any. This picture was to reinforce the role of the citizen, what they need to do and what they need to promote as green ambassadors for their own localities. One key element of this campaign was that the students were requested to take the contest card home and practice it for seven days and also doing the segregation at their own home. They were informed that 1,200 postcards with six categories of source separation have been pressed into service for litter free and bin free system for most of the wards. After the lesson was completed, the adjudicator or Guinness accepted that the record attempt has been successfully completed following all guidelines, and handed over the certificate to the commissioner. This is the photo where you can see the adjudicator giving the certificate to the commissioner. This is another picture showing the Guinness Book of World Records certificate and how many people and organizations, volunteer associations who contributed and participated in this record-breaking attempt. The recycling rate since then has gone from a mere 6% to 23% in the last few months. That means dumping of recyclables and compostable waste reduced by 23%, or nearly 120 tons per day in this city. This one single campaign encouraged other similar campaigns like Zero Waste Wards and Happy Street Campaigns. You can see it in the pictures, where the roads were cleaned, they were decorated, children played games over it and Coimbatore also became the first city in India to segregate waste in six different categories partially by the households, and partially by the trained collection team. As I stated, the Guinness campaign triggered many more such community awareness initiatives in Coimbatore. No Food Waste became one of the hit campaigns that picked up steam, actually, after this campaign was completed. The leftover food from five star hotels, restaurants, marriage parties, were collected, kept in a very safe manner, and distributed to the poor in the city. This is still going on. Many engineering graduates, who were very passionate about recycling, chucked their jobs and took the business of recycling as a social enterprise after this campaign. To conclude, I can say that it requires a very well thought out strategy to run any campaign and get the momentum going to get any tangible results. It is also important to install the system in advance to get the public familiar with it. The idea is the system should be in place before organizing a campaign so that people can start practicing immediately after learning the lessons or the messages of the campaign. One should also find a way to share the results of the campaign with the public. For example, one can share the recycling rate. One can also share with them that a new door to door collection system has been put into place. One can also share how much organic waste is being composted now so that you can ensure further action both from the municipal staff as well as from the citizens. Finally, thank you for giving me this opportunity to share the experience with one and all. Thank you.
