India’s First ‘Garbage Café’ Lets You Exchange Trash For Free Food

A desperate call yet brilliant work to curb India’s uncontrollable garbage problem, a café in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh lets you exchange garbage for free meal. A win-win initiative for all, the café which will help provide hearty food to the starving, while incentivising garbage collection and keeping the streets cleaner. The cafe gives you a free meal for every kilo of trash you collect or a filing breakfast for 500 grams of it. The cafe operates from the city's main bus stand and the environmentalist in you can go gave a hearty meal in exchange for a bag of garbage.

And what is even better is that the waste collected will be used to build roads in Ambikapur. This idea to build roads made of garbage will be a continuation to the brilliant road idea which the city of Ambikapur previously constructed suing 8 lakh plastic bags and asphalt.

This initiative to curb garbage problems has in fact been practised in other parts of the US, Europe and even Cambodia.

In India, about 70% of the plastic the country consumes is simply discarded. Large amounts end up in the water by way of the River Ganges, which comes second only to China's Yangtze in the amount of plastic it contributed to the world's oceans, according to a 2017 study.  

Barely 35,600 metric tonnes (MT) and just eight of 35 states process more than half the daily garbage generated in the city resulting to more trash-like mountains of Ghazipur.

HIGHLIGHTS

• An initiative of the Municipal Corporation, the idea of the café it to provide hearty food to the homeless and poor
• The cafe gives you a free meal for every kilo of trash you collect
• The garbage collected will be used to build robust roads in Ambikapur