An increasing number of environmentally conscious parents are reducing their carbon footprint by choosing sustainable alternatives to secure a better and healthier future for their children. Making the determined decision to leave a reduced carbon footprint necessitates a significant amount of dedication. When a baby is involved, maintaining an environmentally responsible lifestyle becomes quite difficult. In both discourse and lived experiences, there are interesting linkages between mothers, motherhood, and environmental activism.
Here are a rising group of environmentally concerned parents who have made zero-waste parenting look simple!
1) SEEMA RAJPUT
It appears according to Rajput, parenthood comes with a tremendous desire to offer the best for your child now and in the future. Realising the necessity of building a deeper and more attentive connection through her actions, after having her son, she became increasingly worried about the excessive use of plastic toys and other products around her son. It was not only harmful for the baby, but also for their future. In order to tackle the same, she began exploring more sustainable methods of living. Some ways to reduce plastic usage and waste included incorporating cardboard, egg cartons, abandoned containers and used papers in their arts and crafts. She makes significant use of them when it comes to creating learning tools for her son. In a world full of depleting resources and escalating demands, she makes a conscious effort to encourage the creative use of simple, repurposed materials to generate play items.
Rajput asserts that encouraging children to utilize what they already have is not only good for the environment, but it also improves their creative thinking, allowing them to envision new possibilities beyond the original purpose, assisting them in becoming future resourceful inventors. Her vision of sustainability believes that it is a continuous process that begins at home, which takes no more than an indigenous mindset, the courage to reject less and accept more, and a lack of consumerism greed.
2) GARIMA ROY
Roy believes that becoming a parent gives one a tremendous sense of purpose and responsibility to grow into a more conscious person. She strived to live a simple life, and the birth of her son only bolstered some of the beliefs she held. After spending a decade in a Goan village she claims that rural life kept her grounded in a variety of ways. Among the countless parenting decisions she made, one of them was to ditch the factory made diapers and uses cloth diapers instead. Garima was also extensively adamant against gifts to avoid owning and wasting more than required. Rather than purchasing a swing online, she combined her design education with her passion for her child and the environment to create a swing from the ground up and took it a step further in 2015 by launching ‘Other-wise’, an effort aimed at creating a holistic childhood through simple and detailed items that are environmentally friendly and fair to all involved in their development. She also strongly advocates for freeplay, gender neutral products that are made with natural ingredients and staying clear of gimmicky visuals. She doesn’t see much of a difference between her work and personal choices. Her Mantra is to refuse the things that are not needed and recycle as much as possible.
Talwalkar disagrees with the concept that children consume too much of the finite resources and are therefore unsustainable. She claims that once her daughter was born, she began to consider the world she was leaving behind for her child. Neha saw the irony of how much of her life was filled with disposable objects that had permanent implications, as she considered the future with every decision she made. Pregnancy taught her the importance of eating full, organic foods, and parenting led her to her first bamboo-based toothbrush. To Talwalkar, ‘sustainable living’ is ‘mindful living’. Often lamenting the days when she worked for fast fashion firms to transform into a more sustainable mother, her daughter taught her to be a more conscious and mindful person.
4) TEJA ARIGELA
Arigela claims that the day she began inquiring about the type of material her kid was wrapped in, is the day she truly became a mother. Subsequently, she sensed a significant mental shift in herself. Soon after, she stumbled across an article concerning the bumble-bee extinction, it’s links to the food chain and its adverse effects on future generations. This elicited a slew of emotions in her, including concern over the future of her new baby. It is that anxiety that planted the seed of sustainable living in her head. Slowly, she began to make one shift at a time, unconcerned about the minor impact it would have. It progressed from water conservation to plastic reduction to becoming a responsible consumer in her own way. Teja tries to be environmentally conscious when it comes to celebrating occasions involving her little munchkin. As a result, in the last three years, she has ditched balloons in favour of environmentally friendly alternatives such as PomPom and jute banners. The eco-mum insists that living a sustainable lifestyle is a personal journey, not a “one size fits all” scenario and there are multiple social, economic and physical barriers that depend from person to person. Nevertheless, each one should do as much as they can to make the planet a better place for the future generations.
Written by, Aastha Khera
