• A chat with Green Life Generation Founder Savandie Abeyratna

With World Environment Day having fallen on Monday (5), there was significant focus on how we need to improve to ensure a better environmental future. However, building a better environmental future is not something we can achieve solely by looking at the environment, and this is what Green Life Generation (GLG) Founder and CEO Savandie Abeyratna has come to realise.

Green Life Generation is a social research, sustainable development, and alternative education organisation offering curated sustainable solutions. Since its inception in 2017, GLG has fostered a movement to address the interconnected social problems of waste management, sustainable livelihood, and unity within local communities. 

The movement is currently based in Kangalla in Kandy, Savandie’s hometown. Speaking to Savandie about GLG and its origins, The Sunday Morning Brunch learnt that the movement was born of the need to ensure the wellbeing of persons entrapped in a system that has been set up to fail. 

Savandie founded GLG when she was reading for her PhD in social work and social policies. Her work studied migrant domestic workers – Sri Lankan women who had travelled to the Middle East and were highly vulnerable. One of the biggest issues she discovered was the economic instability of most livelihoods, which she then paired with her passion for the environment. 

“I am from Kandy; I grew up with greenery and my area is a very agricultural area. I loved that life, living with nature, and that is where the Green Life name came from as well,” she said. 

Savandie also shared that whenever she returned to Sri Lanka during the time she had lived in the UK, she would always face the problem of waste. One of the incidents that had inspired her to commence GLG had been the Meethotamulla garbage dump disaster, which had happened on Avurudu day when she had been in Sri Lanka with her family. 

“I realised that what we need are not just socioeconomic solutions, but also socio-ecological solutions,” she said, noting that she had then started to look at unsustainable livelihoods as well as the issue of waste management and how to solve both at once. 

I Am Upcycled 

With a background in research and an interest in social justice and policy change, Savandie shared that when she founded GLG, she had been well aware that “policies are always top-down and what we need are actually bottom-up solutions,” which is why she had chosen to situate herself in her village and to begin working from the grassroots. 

She had a very clear vision of how she wished for its activities to progress and the very first steps had been in tackling the issue of developing sustainable lifestyles for local communities, for which purpose she and her husband Ilija Klimoski started ‘I Am Upcycled,’ which has since developed into a known local brand. 

Through her own work and then with GLG, Savandie shared that they had realised that the self-employment model, which was what was often encouraged for persons who were trying to rise economically, was not actually working. “This self-employment model is not working, especially for the women in these communities, for whom it is said to be empowering. It is actually a trap; people end up in debt and it is unsustainable. I realised that what is most suitable is a small and medium enterprise model, so we went about implementing that.” 

Addressing how the brand ‘I Am Upcycled’ first came to be, Savandie shared that it had begun with her and her husband’s personal investment, hiring a few women from the area with their own money in order to give them work. I Am Upcycled then became one of the first solutions that they were able to come up with. 

“Through this brand, we looked at hiring those who were most vulnerable. Through my research, I was able to recognise the people most likely to fall through the cracks and we would seek out and employ such people,” she said. 

“When we started, it was mostly a part-time option available for mothers who had to drop off their children in pre-school. It has now been about six years and they have been with us throughout the primary education of their children. Originally, it involved this group of women who were marginalised from the labour force due to their care responsibility. Then we looked into the hierarchy of vulnerability – single mothers, women with husbands with disabilities, etc. We try to address these needs when hiring.”

The country facing various crises since 2019 forced ‘I Am Upcycled’ to evolve, especially since, for the most part, much of it involved Savandie and her husband putting in their own money to pay the salaries of their hires. They were faced with these realities when the economic crisis hit. 

“A spotlight was on the quality of production and when it comes to things like quality, some groups, like women over 35 with disabilities, were struggling to keep up, and these are the groups that fall through the cracks. At this point, our business had grown to about 16 employees and we couldn’t handle the salaries we had to pay. Regrettably, we had to make the tough decision to let go of some of the employees,” she said, adding: “After that, I thought that this was not what I had signed up for, and if this was how it was going to be, I’d rather stop it.” 

Birth of bincoins 

Following these unfortunate circumstances, they had thought to look elsewhere for solutions, Savandie noted. “I had a little retail outlet at the time and I thought that even though there were no tourists and the country was essentially closed, we should just open the shop and bring back some of the women we had to let go,” she said. 

However, they were then faced with another crisis. “Our raw materials were waste products. I never thought we would ever face a raw material crisis, because there is always waste to be utilised. However, with the economic crisis and lack of certain products like cement and milk powder, we couldn’t find cement, paper, milk cartons, etc.” 

Nevertheless, there was a solution. “Our shop was in front of a school and we had a second-hand rack in that shop. We opened up a space for the mothers to come and exchange their cardboard and other waste for clothes,” she said, which was when they had realised that this practice could become a much bigger idea. 

The exchange system has since evolved into a whole ecosystem, giving way to their alternative currency known as ‘bincoin,’ through which the locals are able to exchange their waste not only for products, but now for services as well. 

This ecosystem has grown to about 400 members who bring in waste and have now moved over into the service provision side. Savindie said that they were now able to employ those women who may not be able to develop the crafts as neatly, who could nevertheless continue to benefit from this system. “We now have a café, a boutique, and a daycare and all of the transactions happen through bincoins – waste is the currency,” she said.  

Social innovation 

At its core, what GLG is trying to do is initiate a system change. “I am building a sustainable business model and it will take time to perfect. Right now, there are a lot of questions and not a whole lot of answers, but we are on a problem-solving mission,” Savandie explained, noting that there were many waste management systems and that theirs was just one of them. 

It is, however, a unique system for Sri Lanka and for the region, and what she would like to see is local communities adopting this little ecosystem. State support was also imperative when it came to developing policy, she noted, since at present the responsibility for waste management fell on the consumer, when it should in fact be on the producer – the multinationals that only committed to surface level green-friendly activities in order to slap the recycle sign on their products.

“The responsibility must shift to these corporations and that shift must come from a change in laws and policies, which is the responsibility of the Government to implement. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is the regulation we are pushing for. Currently, there is some movement in this regard, but the plastic value chain is calling the shots so it is not going far enough,” Savandie said.

Concluding, she shared that often social innovation did not tend to count as innovation. “When you think of innovation, it is tech-focused or there are certain biases. What we are doing here is trying to implement a system change.” They hope that despite these existing challenges, Sri Lankan communities are able to recognise the necessity of this kind of change and soon implement it, or if not, find even better solutions to better themselves and their surroundings.