“One of our earliest installations was a toilet for women working on a tea estate in Assam. After it was built, one of them said, ‘This is the first time in 20 years that I feel like a human being.’ That’s when we knew we had to do more,” Amit Roy, founder of Green Ammo, shares with The Better India.

In a country grappling with an ever-growing plastic crisis (9.3 million tonnes annually) and mountains of unrecycled waste, stories like these shine a spotlight on the power of grassroots innovation. Green Ammo, a non-profit led by Amit Roy and Momo, is not just managing waste; they’re transforming it. Their unique approach of turning soft plastic waste into durable “Bottle Bricks” is creating infrastructure like toilets, benches, libraries, school walls, and even museums across India and Nepal.

But beyond the brick and mortar, what Green Ammo is building is something far more important – dignity, access, and a collective sense of purpose.

How a simple idea took shape in a village and sparked a movement

The concept of Bottle Bricks is deceptively simple. Clean, dry, soft plastic waste, think chips packets, wrappers, cling film, is tightly stuffed into plastic PET bottles, which are then sealed and used like regular bricks. Each brick removes at least 250 grams of plastic from the environment and can last for over 300 years. When combined with cement, these bricks can be used to build anything from walls to furniture.

It all began in Khonoma, Nagaland, India’s first green village, where Amit was leading a sustainability workshop. “We realised most of the waste was soft plastic, easy to throw away but hard to recycle. I asked the villagers, ‘Can you give me 200 PET bottles and soft plastic waste?’ They delivered them in a week,” Amit shares.

Using those discarded materials, Amit built a public bench in the village. “That was our first test site. It’s still there,” he says proudly. Encouraged by the results and community engagement, Amit and Momo decided to scale the idea.

What started as a simple experiment soon transformed into a scalable, replicable model of community-driven change. Bottle Bricks became a symbol of self-reliance, innovation, and hope.

More than waste management, it’s about earning trust and empowering communities

From the highlands of Sikkim to the tribal villages of Madhya Pradesh, Green Ammo now works with hundreds of communities and schools. “People often assume that villagers or students will not take an interest. But we’ve seen children light up........

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