This Indian school accepts plastic waste instead of fees

It’s not unusual for children to arrive at school carrying bags. Usually, you might expect them to be full of books. But at one school in India, students are turning up with bags of trash.

The country has a plastic waste problem, generating 26,000 tonnes of the stuff every day. And in Pamohi, in the northeastern state of Assam, people had taken to burning it to keep warm in the harsh winters of the Himalayan foothills.

However, three years ago, when Parmita Sarma and Mazin Mukhtar arrived in the area and set up the Akshar Foundation School, they came up with an innovative idea: asking parents to pay their children’s school fees with plastic waste.

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