Last year, on the occasion of ‘Plastic Free July’, a team of teenagers from Navi Mumbai decided to make shelters for street dogs using plastic waste. The monsoon season has always been particularly tough on stray dogs with few spaces to give them cover. So team Urvari —an amalgamation of the Sanskrit words ‘urvi’ (earth) and ‘vaari’ (water) — decided to make a refuge for them using ‘eco bricks’. “All of the plastic waste like chips packets, wrappers etc that come to our house are stuffed inside empty plastic bottles tightly and that is how you make an eco brick,” explains Vasundhara Gupte, co-founder of Urvari. 

Urvari was started in 2019 by Gupte and her friend Khushi Shah, who were 16 years old at the time. They were so overwhelmed by the news about Amazon fires, they decided it is time to do their bit for the environment. They started with a simple goal – planting five trees each week. What started as an individual effort now has culminated into a team of 200 volunteers across India. The team – which mostly comprises 17 and 18 year olds – initially did not know what to do with the eco bricks. So, they gave them for recycling. However, looking at how miserable the monsoon proves for the strays, they started working on the idea of creating something for these animals with the help of eco bricks. “It was a very ambitious project. This had never been done before because we didn’t have a tutorial on YouTube. The collection of plastic from all over Mumbai was also a tedious process,” says Gupte. They required 150 eco bricks, which equals almost 40 kgs of plastic waste.