By Hasanka Padduka

I moved out from my corporate job and became a Social Entrepreneur with a focus on building solutions and business models to solve social issues in line with some selected Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations. My journey opened pathways to shape my personal capacity to develop novel social innovations and give back something good for both humankind and nature.

Throughout my life I noticed that this country was losing forest cover every year and that deforestation was a serious problem, threatening Sri Lanka’s biodiversity. As a solution I co-founded a Mobile App called “Thuru” which works as a digital platform to record individual and group efforts on tree planting initiatives with the ability to monitor and record progress over time.

This App which I like to refer as the “Facebook for trees” encourages younger generations in my community to help solve environmental issues, using their phones. The Thuru App functions as a social networking platform that brings people together and form a community. Each user can plant a tree and upload it to the app with a photo, geotag location, and details about the variety of tree for others to see. Today Thuru is a well-developed ecosystem which comprises an online store, a volunteer network and drones capable of seed dropping resulting recognitions locally and internationally through various awards and honors.

Apart from Thuru, I am also a co-founder of www.zerotrash.lk an initiative launched towards battling against plastic pollution in Sri Lanka in line with strengthening a circular economic model. I envisioned a trash free Sri Lanka and started ZeroTrash in 2019. And to date, I have through ZeroTrash collected over 250,000 plastic PET bottles which have been sent for recycling. However, I wanted to take this project further and develop models to make the process more economical. Among the main challenges we faced in Sri Lanka were the absence of models such as the “Polluter-pay” principle and the limited support from the local councils to implement feasible collection practices.

As a result, I started my journey of plastic collection literally being garbage collector and I quickly learnt of the integral problems in the process. I started fine-tuning the process over the past few months and I have so far set up my own models with various routes, type of plastic & weightage per collection. At the beginning, I was at staggering losses up to 80% and after 5 months of refinement I managed to reduce this to less than 10%.

At present ZeroTrash collects over 2 MT of plastic for recycling and the majority is PET at a makeshift place in Colombo and we felt it was an opportune time to expand our collections as well as the types of plastics. For this purpose, I sought the support of Plasticcycle an initiative by John Keells Group launched in 2017 and Ceylon Cold Stores, more commonly known as Elephant House. With their support I developed a model which allowed ZeroTrash to break even over time, through efficient plastic collections routes, the establishment of a dedicated collection center in Colombo and raising awareness on the challenges faced and actions required by our communities. We hope to scale up our efforts in the following months to collect between 15 – 20 Metric Tons of recyclable plastic waste commencing in Colombo with the aim of expanding to other districts and regions over the next 5 years.