Trash talk heats up - The Hindu

Trash talk heats up - The Hindu: "Reclaim Our Beaches, a non-profit student initiative has been looking at waste management issues for a long time. In 2010, the group conducted a Spatial Mapping of Chennai’s beaches along with Transparent Chennai, where they mapped how much trash different parts of Elliot’s Beach received at different points of time. To help with locations for trash bins, they also had a heat map containing a point density algorithm to show the most concentrations of trash. In 2012, they released ‘The Adyar River Estuary Waste Audit Report’ and found that the estuary contained 663 unique products belonging to 11 different categories like food and drink, household etc. About 85 per cent of these products were packaged in plastic or silver foil. “Beach clean-ups are a superficial way to deal with waste management,” says Siddharth Hande, co-founder, ROB. “This is a much larger problem because there is garbage not just because of littering but because a lot of the garbage is not eco-friendly. This is not just about waste but about what it has and where it is coming from.”"

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