Reuse yesteryear, recycle the current, save the near future!
Every year we keep on rising, some in success and some in other ways but there is one way in which we all keep rising the same and that is creating waste. From a used paper to plastic everything becomes waste for us once it serves no purpose and this way we generate around 8 billion plastic waste every year.
Circle 4 is a group of some environment enthusiasts who were really bothered with this generation of plastic waste and decided to become a seed of change for their era. Our Mega project idea revolves around a start-up by six individuals, known as Revitae.
Revitae aims to recycle plastic bottles and glasses, that are thrown as waste, into decorative bottle planters. We believe that when Pakistan is on its mission of planting millions of trees, our contribution through Revitae will bring some impact as well.
Within a period of one month (April 28-May 31st) Circle 4 plans to prepare 30 bottle planters for its targeted audience that is university students, teachers and orphanages at the moment. Every day the team spends about 20–30 minutes preparing a decorated planter from plastic waste.
To bring Revitae to life Circle 4 planned the following Business Model for it:
We believe that an action cannot be carried out without a solid plan, therefore; our circle has prepared a well organized plan and timeline for the project. The timeline is as follows:
- Creation of social media pages: 20th and 21st April 2021
- Promotion of social media pages: 20th April to 31st May 2021
- Approval of Proposal: 27th April 2021
- Nursery Survey: 1st, 4th and 6th May 2021
- Crafting of planters: 10th May to 31st May 2021
- Selling of planters: 31st May to 10th June 2021
Teamwork is an essential tool towards achieving your dreams-this is what that has been taught to us at Amal Academy and Circle 4 sets its ground firm on this rule. We diligently divided our tasks to achieve hundred percent efficiency in our project. The task distribution was done in the following way:
PROJECT TASK AND MEMBER RESPONSIBLE
Managing social media pages: Hafsa Yasir and Ashar ul Haque
Nursery surveys: Ayaz Ali, Shoaib Salman and Madiha Rehman
Crafting of bottles: Hafsa, Madiha, Ashar, Ayaz and Shoaib
Project Funding: Aizaaz
Of course the circle leaders were asked to prepare the blogs for their project but we believe that our story is incomplete without reflection from each member of their journey and the challenges they have faced or anticipate in the near future. So here is our story being told in the words of each member of our team.
Our member Madiha says:
“Plastic waste recycling was my idea and my group fully supported it but I knew little about creating social media pages or even establishing the business itself. Upon sharing the idea with my friends I mostly received leg pulling from them. They even called me with names such as ‘Afghani’ since they are the people who are normally seen picking up trash. I am glad that my team was well skilled in problem solving. They did not only accept my idea but my team member Hafsa helped me in creating the logo for our brand by asking her brother while Ashar taught me all the right ways to make posts for social media. For this project I anticipate one major challenge that is to be able to sell my planters to my targeted audience”
Not being able to convince our target audience is a major challenge in our project and to solve this I have approached one of my professors at the university who will let our circle decorate his department’s office with our planters to create promotion for our product.
Our another member Aizaaz says:
“So it all started when we got approval for our project and we created our social media page on different platforms and started sharing them with our circle. Our group leader got some skills and she had some good designs for our products and everybody was contributing fully except me because I was working on a job and couldn’t participate that much but I promised my group to collect finance for our project but unfortunately I couldn’t manage as much as I was expecting so I had to take a loan from my friend instead.”
Since Aizaz quit his job he was unable to finance the project fully as his salary was stopped and this brought our group the second challenge. We had a vision but no way of buying the supplies for creating our desired products but Aizaaz decided not to quit so easily and went to the extent of borrowing money from his friends so that the project does not get delayed.
Hafsa and Ashar, our dedicated members, who manage our social media pages say:
“I was given the task of managing our promotion page on Facebook. The purpose of creating social media pages was to sell our products to people online but we have been facing a lot of difficulties on this. Ashar and I also promoted the pages through Whatsapp, Instagram and to our family & friends but because we have so little time we have not been so successful. Also, while creating the page I thought that we would get 500 to 600 followers but so far we have managed only 24 followers on our Facebook page.”
“Creating social media pages was an important part of the mega project since this is how we aimed to spread our message to a greater audience so that we can get more buyers. At first it seemed easy and we thought we’d get a good number of followers but that didn’t happen. The target was to get at least 200+ followers and we were able to get a reach of more than 400–550 people through sharing the posts from our Whatsapp, Instagram stories, etc but the number of followers we got on Instagram was only 52. Now, one of the reasons for such a low number is that we weren’t able to update the page regularly, as everyone was busy due to Ramzan and other activities but now we are back on track and have already started working on the upcoming posts for the pages that will help us attract greater audience and get more followers.”
Knowing that this is a serious challenge, Hafsa and Ashar have been regularly working on approaching their friends and contacts but seeing that it was getting hard on them, us, the other circle members, also contributed in reaching out our contacts to follow our social media pages. More than that, we plan to send advertisements to several newspapers to spread awareness about our product.
Our most talented member Shoaib shares his reflection by saying:
“Promoting our aim through social media pages and spreading awareness to people through our page and starting from our families was the part I really enjoyed but the best part was to survey different nurseries to collect plants and then crafting bottles into beautiful planters. One of the challenge was visiting different nurseries only to find out that the plants I wished to purchase were really expensive and out of our budget”
Shoaib worked on his strategy more and later came up with the solution of transplanting plants. With the help of his other friend outside the fellowship he transplanted a money plant into many planters and helped the group save the cost that it was unable to manage.
