Govt Arts College replaces plastic covers in project reports with paper

Coimbatore: After taking steps to eliminate plastic carry bags, bottles, plastic tumblers and flex boards on its campus, the Government Arts College in the city has now taken its plastic abolition drive a notch up by eliminating plastic wrappers in students’ project report copies.
While final year students of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes submit their thesis at the end of their course, the procedure required them to bind it and cover with plastic wrappers. But, from this year, through the ‘Plastic Free Zone’ of the college’s Save Nature Cell, the plastic wrappers have been replaced by paper.

All reports that students submitted such as final-year project reports and other assignments contained plastic in the form of covers, assistant professor at the department of Economics K Vasanthi said. “There was also plastic in the documents such as syllabus and curriculum given out by the college. Now, we have replaced the spiral binding and plastic wrappers with paper wrappers,” she told TOI.

On Thursday, the students submitted theses bound using paper wrappers. “A total of 1,337 UG final-year project reports and 582 PG final-year project reports would be submitted every year across all departments and so much plastic can be eliminated by using paper covers for binding the reports,” said Vasanthi, who set up the Save Nature Cell.

The Save Nature Cell was inaugurated in the college in March 2018 and since then, it has taken initiatives to do away with single use plastic products in canteen with cloth bags, plastic jugs and tumblers in exam halls with steel ones and flex banners with cloth banners.

The mission of the cell is to make the college plastic-free and set an example.