Why We Boldly Go: Arun is Sowing the Seeds of Collaboration and Innovation

When Operation Possible on plastics started, around the same time, my son was actually looking for a project, a school project, to look at how do we reduce plastics in our day to day life. So this gave me an opportunity to start digging deep into how do I reduce my consumption of plastic as an individual? And how do we do it as a group, as a family? And how do we do it at the company as well.

So initially, when I started looking into Operation Possible, I wanted to post a lot of new ideas. But when I got into the platform, I found that some of the ideas that I had were already posted by someone. It may not be exactly the same, but quite similar ones. And I started to see that rather than posting new ideas, I will be more valuable in providing comments to existing ideas. That way, I could encourage the people who are posting ideas to post more, and then try to see if they could make a better idea out of it. So this started an effect where lots and lots of people started joining in.

So when we started it, well, it was about 10 people who were actually posting ideas and reviewing it. By the few weeks, it was already crossing 1000s. A lot of the ideas that came in from people were mostly for household, which could easily be implemented at our home. I have been working with, basically, with my son and some of the actions that he took, after looking at those ideas were to see how he could reduce the usage of plastics on his day to day activities. In that way he got interested in the whole project.

In terms of the three R's, you'll get to see a triangle that says reduce, reuse, recycle, that's more prominent. But one area that we tend to over see right is the repurposing. In order to do that it requires a bit of creativity. And I saw that the kids actually have the creativity. So when they are given something to do with a product, they always try to find other ways of using it.

For example, to use plastic bottles, we thought we could make some art out of it. So basically take these LED strip light, and then make a study lamp out of this. This could be done by a kid and he's happy because he's able to make it. They want to make sure that the concept or the ideas, we see that very early.

At least we start to educate our kids so that they can be aware and as they grow up, they reduce their consumption overall throughout their lifetime. And this is the biggest impact that they can create on the planet Earth.