Bidyanondo turns Bangladesh election posters into notebooks

Halima, 5, wears excitement on her face. 

She is among the children who received the first lot of the notebooks made using the election posters and banners. 

Halima, who lives in a juvenile shelter in Mirpur 11, is a student at the Bidyanondo School.

As she thumbs the pages of her new notebook, she keeps wondering what she would fill these refurbished pages with. 

The gift of notebooks is from Bidyanondo, which turned the election posters and banners into notebooks. 

It's one man's trash turned to another's treasure.

Some 27,000 tonnes of plastic-wrapped posters, banners, cards, and leaflets were used in the country during the recently ended elections, most of which are currently on their way to the landfills. 

But Bidyanondo, the foundation behind the popular Ek Takar Ahar (1-Taka Meal) initiative, found a way to turn these mountains of wastes into valuable study materials that work as a beacon of hope for children like Halima.

The foundation aims to effectively turn election wastes into school supplies, including notebooks and bags, for 1,000 children in their orphanages, schools, and learning centres.

The foundation won't even let the rope used to hang the posters go to waste as those are used in handicrafts and binding relief materials.

Some fifty volunteers of the foundation are already on the streets of Dhaka and Chattogram, collecting all sorts of election waste.

But how do election posters turn into notebooks?

"We try to sort all of the election waste as we collect them. We keep the clean ones for our notebooks. We keep the creased and wrinkled ones to be used for handicrafts," Bidyanondo Vice Chairman Faruque Ahmed said.

With the laminated posters and plastic banners, Bidyanondo is making shopping bags that they can use to distribute relief items. 

They will also use these bags when they give supplies to the students of Bidyanondo School so that these can be used as school bags.

"We will reuse every single piece of election waste we can gather," he added.

"Our method of collecting the waste differs from that of the city corporations. We try to gather the waste that is salvageable," said Bidyanondo's Communication Manager Abdullah Al Mamun.

He also said they could salvage some of the waste gathered by the city corporation in Dhanmondi.

"We are collecting waste at the same time they [city corporations] are collecting it, and they are allowing us to do that. We even salvaged some of the waste they collected in Dhanmondi yesterday. We don't have any formal arrangements with them. But we consider this as support to our initiative," Faruque said.

Election posters already have text written on one side. So Bidyanondo is using the opposite side, which is mostly white.

"In rare cases, when we find posters with texts on both sides, we give those to the street vendors," he added.

He also said they have talked to the candidates on the posters, hoping to find unused ones.

Recalling the 2020 city corporation polls, he said Bidyanondo received unused posters from some mayoral candidates when the initiative was first introduced.

"This year, we are yet to receive any unused posters. Two of the elected MPs, one from Mirpur and another from Dhanmondi, have shown their interest in donating all of their unused posters to us," Bidyanondo vice chairman said, adding that these unused posters would make the cleanest notebooks among the lot.

He also said while the aim is to make enough supplies for six months, they will keep making notebooks for as many clean posters as possible.

Faruque wants to inspire others to follow suit and join Bidyanondo in the movement to reuse recyclable wastes.