Rejuvenating a clean air under ‘Clean India’

PepsiCo India and Project Mumbai, in an initiative, called, Jallosh, cleaned the Mumbai waterfronts and the coast, including the Mumbai beaches and the rivers. The drive started from 1st June Mithi river and the other nine beaches and four rivers across Mumbai. Around 5,000 citizens joined hands to clean 16,000 kg trash from Mumbai’s waterfronts over the weekend. The drive is in line with the Government of India’s vision of Clean India (Swachh Bharat Abhiyan) and is being supported by other renowned institutions such as world wide fund for nature (WWF), River March, Beach Warriors, Mahim beach clean-up etc.

Jallosh-clean coasts was simultaneously activated across popular beach stretches along Mumbai’s Girgaon Chowpatty, Worli, Dadar, Mahim, Bandra, Versova, Juhu and Madh, along with banks of the four rivers that run across the city – poisor, mithi, oshiwara and dahisar. The 3-day drive will culminate on the World Environment Day, 5th June.

The purpose was to serve for the people and rejuvenate a positive and clean air for people and positive change. Jallosh-Clean Coasts is one of the PPP initiative, aimed at bringing people (citizens), public (the state and city administration) and private (the corporates) under one roof.

Shishir Joshi, CEO and co-founder, Project Mumbai, said, “Our organisation has consistently aimed at bringing like-minded institutions together for a common and large initiatives, which can lead to social transformation, through scale.”

Elaborating on PepsiCo India’s commitment towards managing plastic waste, Neelima Dwivedi, Vice President, Government Affairs, PepsiCo India, said, “PepsiCo recognises the significance of reducing the impact of plastic packaging on the environment, and collaborating with partner organisations to drive a larger impact for the society. Our sustainable plastics vision is rooted around ‘reducing, recycling and reinventing our plastic packaging waste’ and our target is to transform 100 per cent of our packaging recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable by 2025. PepsiCo has been actively working across multiple states to collect, segregate and sustainably recover 100 per cent of its plastic packaging, towards effective plastic waste management by 2021”. Adding further, Neelima said, “PepsiCo India would like to congratulate Project Mumbai for organising Jallosh on such a massive scale as a run up to World Environment Day.

Paras Gupta, Head – Marketing, GEM Enviro Management Pvt Ltd, said, “We, at GEM Enviro, are highly committed towards environment sustainability and waste management. We are working with many corporates including PepsiCo in Maharashtra to collect and recycle plastic waste.” He further added, “For Jallosh, the plastic waste, will be transported to our collection centre, shall be segregated and then would be sent to respective recyclers to produce different products. We would be reinventing it into products such as t-shirts, backpacks, flower pots, dust bins, etc. The idea is making Mumbai beaches clean and litter free and to work towards sustainability and circular economy”.

In-addition, the company also deployed special collection trucks at all locations to enable the transportation of the collected plastic waste through its waste management partner GEM Enviro. All plastic waste collected from the drive will be segregated, cleaned and converted into useful new usable products such as t-shirts, bins, traffic cones and chairs.