Kalambe has been diligently cleaning up beaches in Mumbai, using his social media reach to motivate youngsters and create awareness about environment conservation
Social media can get toxic at times, but it is also a great way to reach out to more people: Malhar Kalambe
Image: Amit Verma
It started with a simple question: “If you have a problem with it, why don’t you do something about it?” It was the end of Ganesh Chaturthi in 2017, and Malhar Kalambe, then a college student pursuing BCom, was complaining to his mother about how the festivities pollute the city’s beaches. His mother, an entrepreneur running a garments business, simply suggested that if he had an issue with pollution at the beach, he should do something about it. Kalambe then gathered some of his friends to go to Dadar beach that weekend and clean it up.
What started purely out of concern has now turned into an initiative called Beach Please, where Kalambe and a community of over 250,000 volunteers have cleaned beaches for over 232 weeks as of June-end, collecting and disposing over 67 lakh kg of trash. All along, Kalambe has leveraged the power of social media to draw attention to his cause, create awareness about plastic pollution and environment conservation, and get volunteers from schools, colleges, cultural institutions and corporates.
Every Saturday, Malhar Kalambe, 24, and his volunteers organise a clean-up at the Mithi River bank near Mahim, and on Sunday, at the mangrove forest near Airoli. Over the years, they have found almost every kind of trash tossed into the sea, like sofa sets and other furniture, clothes, medical waste, face masks and backpacks, apart from single-use plastic and MLPs (multi-layered packaging). In the wake of the pandemic, they have also found lots of discarded Covid test kits.
These clean-ups typically last for two hours, starting with a brief of how to go about the activity, and ending with a session on takeaways from participants, why clean-ups are important, how they help conservation, and what people can do at an individual level to make a difference. “It’s not just about turning up to clean the beaches and then going home, it’s also about starting conversations,” says Kalambe, who works towards engaging with the local community to sensitise them, as well as the municipal authorities.
The extent of help Kalambe receives from the municipal authorities is them collecting the waste at the end of every clean-up. Getting volunteers, organising funding and other requirements are completely handled by Kalambe and his team. According to him, consistency is most important. “We have done clean-ups with 2,000 volunteers on a single day, and also three people on a single day. Whether people turn up or not, the work has to go on.”