Gaia Bharat’s 2022 was nothing but amazing with the commencement of “Captain Planet Challenge 2021”, which was an initiative towards the problem of waste management as a part and contribution towards “Swachh Bharat Abhiyan” which is a Clean Indian Mission a country-wide campaign initiated by the Government of India in 2014 to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management.

Captain Planet Challenge was a 7-day waste challenge/workshop where daily hands-on and interesting tasks were being assigned to the participants (Our Planeteers) to complete the same before the deadline.

The motivation behind the Challenge was to –

• Make India a waste-free country by:-
  • To inculcate a sense of responsibility as a human being towards our environment.
  • Instilling the habit of not littering the surroundings.
  • Classifying the waste into their respective streams, from a young age, so that the students become responsible citizens in the future and contribute to raising the standards of living in our country.
  • This fun and educated workshop helps in conveying how to reduce waste.
  • To make them aware of the adversities we’ll face if we don’t work on SWM and protect the environment.
  • Helping people learn about of what exactly segregation is and how simple it is, as well as motivated to talk about it with others.

We had 12 Teams of Planeteers in which everyone had to perform the tasks individually as well in collaboration with their peers and family members. Some tasks were:-

• List out as many waste as generated in their household and describe them in the key document.
• We had an amazing clubhouse session to make everyone vocal about different ways to separate waste at home? And share with everyone how they did it.
• To Interact and involve family members or friends to understand if they handle or segregate their waste or not? And to convince and help them solve this problem!
• To actively spread the awareness of the problem of waste handling at home because segregation in the household is the biggest problem faced in India at the municipal level.
• Using social media to post about all the activities by them to break the taboo that we usually have in an Indian society, that waste is something that needs to be tackled by a certain group of level only. And to change the perception of how we as a society handle this, waste ourselves.

In the Finale round, all teams gave a presentation, by amalgamating all the tasks given to them and presenting how can this problem of waste at the individual level can be solved to help the overburdened municipal corporations in India. And even though we appreciate every single effort from every single participant, we acknowledged three teams after adding all the points and including their extra effort in tackling this problem, just like our Captain Planet would have. Therefore, three teams, Team Wheeler, Team Kwame, and Team Nebula, were announced as the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd position with prize money, certificates, and Company T-shirts!

A survey was also taken after the challenge to analyze if we successfully helped people in understanding waste and we were more than overjoyed to see that 93% of people could learn about the waste problem in India through this challenge, 100% learned why the waste needs to be separated? 92% understood the importance of recycling and could segregate waste at home.

Even though the program was an online challenge because of Covid Restriction, it overjoyed us to see the amazing contribution and outcome from the Planeteers. Every single step from them helped us in spreading the message for this noble cause.

So many people were involved in this wonderful workshop from the comfort of their homes and successfully learned about handling solid waste at the household/school/personal level thus learning the art of making the best out of waste which in return will help in sustaining a better future for our young generation.

And we strongly believe that this was just a beginning from our side in this waste revolution in INDIA and we cannot wait for our “CAPTAIN PLANET CHALLENGE 2022”!