When Venkatraman Iyer walks down the streets, he is often looking for discarded waste products lying around — bottles, bags, or anything plastic. No, he is not a ragpicker. The 75-year-old man is a qualified mechanical engineer, and a tennis coach. But he is a man with the Midas touch; only he is converting waste into something productive. Through his work in the past two decades, he has earned titles like ‘The Wizard of Waste’ and ‘The Hero of Zero Garbage’.
In the early nineties when Indian markets started flooding with plastic bottles, Iyer found the best way to reduce some of the waste lying around by making something out of it.
“I liked the shape of the bottles. I started making trophies for the students at my tennis academy — they liked it immensely,” he recalls. Over the years, he has made an entire garden out of waste plastic bottles and refuse. He transforms old cardboard boxes and even playing cards into useful items like caps.
“Recently I made a cap made of discarded playing cards and gifted to a lady,” he adds. He has also made a cricket bat completely out of waste, a bicycle out of wheelchair tyres and scrap metal and polythene bags stuffed into a pillowcase to make a soft cushion. “When I ride my bicycle people stop to take pictures.”
All of these products are handcrafted. “All I need is a a pair of scissors and a roll of adhesive tapes,” he says. But now, the waste architect is moving from dry waste material to wet ones. “For the past 10 weeks, I have been using it as manure, mixing it with red mud and growing herbal plants in it.”
The concern doesn’t end at recycling waste; he is equally enthusiastic about recycling water. “World War III will be fought for water and people’s life span will decrease drastically because of water, but we can take small steps to curb the water wastage.”
Not only is he recycling the used kitchen water for plants, he has also figured a provision to reuse bathroom water for flushing the toilet. “Eighty per cent of our water is used to flush the toilets, when we know there is water scarcity. Why do we need to use fresh water to flush?” He insists that none of his methods are difficult to follow, and all one needs is a genuine concern.
“My methods are easy and anybody can do it. In fact, many people I know are doing a lot of recycling in their houses. My grand daughter, who lives in the US, has picked the passion for recycling from me and I hope more and more of the younger generation take it up. It’s our responsibility to save the earth from dying.”
