Nurture Nature
Seeking ways to preserve nature as a conscientious community
What is “Plastic Free Choices” (PFC)?
Plastic Free Choices is an Indisha initiative that aims to take action on sustainable living and environmental consciousness by specifically focusing on our “plastic footprint” (plastic consumption and waste) with an effort to “repurpose and redesign” both our need and usage of plastics. This initiative began after our production, Nilam Pesinal, which aimed to raise awareness to form a community that creates cognizant, urgent change in their daily lives after experiencing our honest artistic reflection of human environmental impact through our production.
Although Nilam Pesinal was a great step in sharing our message through our art form, we wanted it to create change in our daily lives beyond bringing awareness. To instill a sense of community and urgency, we created Plastic Free Chennai (PFC) as a community-driven, hands-on solution for single-use plastic waste, a problem that affects both terrestrial and aquatic life, not to mention human health as well. Later, as the initiative began to pick up in Chennai, as well as through our Indisha students outside of Chennai, we changed the name to “Plastic Free Choices” to represent a more global community of devoted change-makers!
We are proud of our journey of baby steps in building a nature conscious community, while also using our art form and our close-knit art community to inspire larger change and inspire one another!
The Journey of “Plastic Free Choices”
Our language, Our Story
Nilam Pesinal, a Bharatanatyam production by Indisha Fine Arts Trust uses dance as a medium to bring awareness to the human impact on the environment, through the voice of Mother Earth.
Choreographers, Nidheesh Kumar & Indu Nidheesh, fear that future generations will be stripped of their opportunity to see the beauties of Mother Nature that is slowly disappearing due to poor lifestyle choices.
View Gallery Here.
…Here Plastic Free Choices was born
Repurposing & Redesigning our need for plastic
Our video features an official step-by-step tutorial we propose to repurpose newspapers into environmentally friendly, cost-effective, handmade paper bags. Using our video on how to make newspaper bags, volunteers in USA and Chennai began repurposing newspapers into handmade newspaper bags.
Let’s expand our reach to build a larger sustainable community…
Invited by TEDx Austin College, USA | “Changing Currents”
Through our poster and hands-on station, we educated the community on how to make newspaper bags, & the need to make a change from single-use plastic to more sustainable alternatives such as the paper bag. We urged community members to think about their plastic bag usage and ways they could be more sustainable in their daily lives. In this global (non-indian) platform, we got to explain how our initiative came from our Bharatanatyam artistic endeavor, Nilam Pesinal. It was a great way for us to share our art form with a new demographic and also demonstrate how art has found purpose in inspiring better daily living (our mission)!
Outreach at Kalakshetra
Here, founder & director of Indisha Trust, Nidheesh Kumar, is presenting 'Nilam Pesinal' & PFC's mission to the students of Kalakshetra Foundation. The art community is vast and powerful in numbers! We thought it would be a great way for us to come together for a larger purpose.
Sai Center Event, Dallas, TX | Heroes of Our Community
We were invited to this service event organized by the Sai Center community of Dallas,TX, to celebrate "Heroes of Our Community.” Many volunteers from various walks of life, joined us in learning how to fold newspaper into bags!
“The Hindu” Newspaper Feature
The Hindu featured a tutorial of Indisha students Raksha Devanathan & Varsha Raj making newspaper bags for The Hindu's 'World Environment Day' special.
"Plastic Free Chennai offers this simple solution to check plastic pollution."
-Shiba Kuria
#DancersOnTheFrontline Series | By Impana Kulkarni
Bharathanatyam dancer, Impana Kulkarni features Nilam Pesinal & the PFC initiative on her "#DancersOnTheFrontline" series.
Check out her series on Facebook for the full post!
5,000+ newspaper bags made!
We thank our growing community of conscientious thinkers and change-makers for inspiring us to live an arts-inspired lifestyle, with a nature inspired purpose.
Follow our journey
Our social media space has been the bridge to our community! You can see our past PFC engagements and initiatives on our socials! We hope to make larger change by providing you with avenues to get involved both on this webpage as well as on our announcements page. Stay tuned!
