We may be a speck in the universe, but the universe is nothing without the sum of the specks. When Dr Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a chemistry professor at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, invented a technology to use plastic waste in making roads, he did not know how impactful his lab experiment will become...

Can we control the ongoing water crisis all by ourselves? It's not about whose responsibility it is, but what we are doing about it. “When water became a commodity, I lost my freedom. More importantly, it put a financial burden on those who couldn’t afford to buy it. Today, water companies sell drinking water and advertise it being rich in minerals and full of vitamins. Big corporates such as soda companies have been buying rivers for industrial purpose and farmers have no water to irrigate their fields. As the rivers dry up, animals also start wandering and enter villages in search of water, with a threat of …

It is estimated that over 40 billion plastic kitchen utensils—including 14–18 billion plastic spoons—are produced every year. Given our low rate of reusing and recycling them, most of this cutlery ends up in landfill sites, or worse, in oceans and lakes! Here, they contaminate the land and soil for at least 450 years—the time plastic takes to degrade. Simply put, this is a recipe for disaster! But there are edible alternatives, read on...

I am waiting for my death. Death? Not exactly. My days are numbered as the ink is about to finish. Soon, I will be discarded and thrown into a dust bin. One more in the countless old ones with finished inks, discarded and to be replaced by a new one.

Government Girls Senior Secondary School, Sikkim is leading the way to reduce plastic waste

Remember the last time you packed a gift on your best friend’s birthday? Well, wrapping up or ‘packaging’ comes naturally to human beings. Not only to make the things inside it look pretty but also to protect them from breaking, tearing or getting dirty. In ancient times, leaves and cloth were the common packaging stuff. But now we have a vast range of ‘packaging materials’. What are they? Also, what happens to the package once we have used what was inside it? It is of no use to us. What happens to the large amount of packaging material generated by huge populations around the world?