Cleaning the city to breathe easier

By

Alastair Macdonald

Nav was 11 when his older brother Vihaan had to go hospital for help to breathe after smoke from a fire at a huge waste dump blanketed their city. That set the boys thinking about cleaning up Delhi’s air.

Delhi, the capital of India, is home to 30 million people – three times more than London. And like many cities in poorer countries, a lot of its rubbish gets burned, or ends up in dumps that often catch fire by accident. Burning waste, plus car fumes and factory smoke, make Delhi one of the most polluted cities on Earth.

When a mountain of trash caught fire in 2017, schools closed and people with asthma like Vihaan suffered. Nav says he felt afraid. He also felt guilty, because his own family was adding to the rubbish every day, causing air pollution and other problems. He and Vihaan decided to change things.

One Step Greener

The brothers realised that cleaner air would start with cleaning up the trash. There were firms recycling rubbish in Delhi, but only a small amount of garbage reached them. Nav and Vihaan started collecting rubbish from friends and neighbours and sorting it carefully into all its different types – paper, cardboard, plastics, metals and so on. They then could sell this to recyclers and the money pays for people to do the collecting and sorting. Every bag recycled is a bag less to be burned or piled on to a smoky trash mountain.

The boys started small, collecting from just 15 homes. It took a lot of persuading to convince adults that these two teenagers could run such an operation. But the idea caught on. In 2021, Nav and Vihaan were awarded the prestigious global award, the Children’s Peace Prize and their organisation One Step Greener has recycled nearly 200 tonnes of trash!

Spreading the word

The fear and guilt that Nav felt at first turned into excitement when he realised he had a solution. Now 15, he juggles schoolwork with managing a team. He loves to spread his ideas to other kids and is also planting trees on old waste dumps, to bring nature back into the city – and trees help clean up the air in other ways too, removing the carbon dioxide that creates global warming.

Nav says, if you want to change the world: “Just start. Start at one home, start at your school, do your one step, so you can create a better future.”

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