From Rent-A-Cutlery Facebook page

Laly Randolf, an activist from Kasavanahalli, was holding a small social event, and wanted to rent steel tumblers. She called a plate bank called Hasiru Mithra Cutlery in HSR Layout, and rented what was needed. She wanted to keep the garbage generated as minimal as possible.

Garbage dumps are a common sight in Bengaluru. If it is not piled up in empty sites or landfills, it is seen in mounds at street corners. This is not just due to poor management by the authorities in charge, but also because of the sheer volume of waste generated by the inhabitants of the city.

Lakshmi Sankaran shared her experience as a volunteer with Whitefield Rising, a citizen movement committed to waste management. “When [Rishita Sharma and I] went to see what exactly contributed to the mounds of waste there, we found that single-use disposables – paper cups, plastic spoons – formed a majority of the garbage present there. At that point, we decided we needed to be a solution.”

Lakshmi and Rishita then co-founded a plate and cutlery bank named Rent-A-Cutlery, which has branches in Whitefield, Sarjapur, J P Nagar, Jayanagar and Malleshwaram. They rent out plates, tumblers, spoons and bowls, all of which are sanitised with a home-made citrus peel bio-enzyme.

“We generally get one or two orders a month for small events, but during festivals, we get a lot of calls,” said Lakshmi. “For that period of time, we are fully booked.” To date, they have prevented 50,000 disposables from going to dumps. In terms of waste generation alone, it is a significant reduction. But on taking into account the fact that it takes nearly a gallon of water and fresh paper to create a single disposable paper cup, reusable cutlery become especially vital in our tree-deficit, water-scarce city. Electricity costs during production of disposables are also avoided.

Rent-A-Cutlery charges a token amount of Rs. 15 per set for 24 hours, while other organisations like Adamya Chetana (a non-profit organisation) give their huge stock of 10,000 plate sets for free while taking a deposit in the form of a cheque, which will be returned upon the returning of the rented cutlery. This NGO, which began their plate bank in 2016, cleans their cutlery using a commercial dishwasher. Their deposits are Rs. 80 per steel plate, Rs. 40 per tumbler, Rs. 30 for a water glass, Rs. 20 per bowl and Rs. 5 per spoons.

Vani Murthy, a member of Solid Waste Management Round Table, also offers a set of fifty plates, cups and tumblers for rent in and around Malleshwaram, so long as customers are willing to pick them up from her home. “While people have some kind of awareness about [plate banks], they still have functions and weddings with disposables because they wouldn’t have paid much attention to such details,” she says. “Awareness and education is very much still an issue that will take time and effort to resolve.”

Here’s a list of the plate banks we have come across.