Curtain call for plastic in Borivli colony

Willie Shirsat, from Borivli’s IC Colony, roams the streets carrying a trendy cotton bag with a leaf embossed on it and a message reading ‘Nurture nature’. It was given to him by the Immaculate Conception Church and is used to carry his grocery and, at times, fish wrapped in paper.

With a capacity of over five kg, one round with the bag makes for a good week’s shopping, and earns him — and his local community — a dollop of goodwill with anti-plastic activists.

“Plastic is making the world a graveyard. If we do not take steps now, we will choke the environment to death soon,” he says.
Little effort but great ingenuity went into tailoring the bag, made as it was from curtains and bed-sheets donated to the parish.
Around 3,000 families like Shirsat’s are using cloth bags as part of IC Colony’s plastic-free zone initiative. It is part of a programme that parish priest Fr Franklyn Mathias, along with his core team of Fr Suren Abreu, Fr Nelson Saldanha and Fr Ashlyn Chand, undertook three years ago, to protect the environment.

The cloth bag initiative, specifically, was kicked off on January 26 when the church decided to free the area of plastic. “The
programme was started by requesting parishioners to donate bed-sheets, curtains and spare cloth. We got a very good response. We started with that and distributed 3,000 cloth bags since February,” said Fr Abreu.

The parish makes bags with help from the women’s empowerment unit it runs six days a week. “Every month, we try to make at least 1,000 bags. Around 30 women get trained for a month to cut and stitch,” he added.

Elias Pinto, who donated three bed-sheets, said, “I visited the centre, and saw the women doing good work. I then got a few clothes from neighbours and friends, and gave nine extra bed sheets.”

The parish has decided to first distribute free bags for all the 4,700 families before selling them over the counter.   

“We will first give one free bag to each family and later make extra to be sold in the market. We are also buying ordinary cloth from outside,” he said.

St Francis School, in the vicinity, has ordered 100 bags for its teachers. “We do not know why. It could be for their grocery use,” added Abreu.

The community’s initiative to go green started with joining the Earth Hour initiative, by requesting 4,500 families in the parish to switch off lights once ever week for an hour. The project moved on to requesting them to walk, and not use private cars to go to church. Recently, parishioners were requested to plant saplings in their societies and nurture them.