Navi Mumbai moves to become a recycle hub with pop-idol recycling and sustainable waste management

Navi Mumbai: The Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) held a meeting with environmental organisations, researchers and civic partners to address urban environmental challenges and build practical, long-term solutions for recycling plaster of Paris (PoP) idols.

The session focused on turning festival waste and daily municipal waste into useful resources through scientific planning, decentralised systems and citizen participation.

The Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) shared details of its PoP recovery pilot project and presented small-scale waste processing technologies that can be adopted locally. It also outlined decentralised waste management models that reduce transport burden and improve segregation and recovery at the source.

A proposal to set up a dedicated recycling project in Navi Mumbai through ICT was discussed, and Commissioner Kailas Shinde said the corporation would examine its feasibility. Representatives from the idol makers association agreed to use recycled PoP to produce new idols, supporting a circular approach.

NuoTerra, a ‘sustainability-first enterprise’, presented an innovative reuse model that converts recycled PoP into school furniture such as study tables. The organisation proposed an understanding with the civic body to collect and hand over discarded idols for processing. Project Mumbai suggested creating a citizen volunteering portal to increase public participation in environmental initiatives and also introduced the Agni Suraksha Vision, which aims to build a network of trained volunteers to improve city safety through community action. Urban biodiversity management was discussed, where Shinde cited the recent tree census showing more than 15 lakh trees across more than 225 locations, and said the city is prioritising indigenous plantations to strengthen ecological value.