Bilaspur is well-known for its extreme summers. This was confirmed in 2017 when it recorded one of India’s highest temperatures at 49.3 degrees Celsius. This sort of extreme heat is just one of the many environmental degradations that we have been imposing on the planet.

Another one that is ever-present is the careless dumping of single-use plastic, which chokes the soil and drains the water – adding to the heat.

“When we started to think of a solution to either of the problems, we realised we could tackle both at once,” says 18-year-old Prakash Nirmalkar, from the Government Higher Secondary School, Bilaspur.

It took almost a year for Prakash and his team, Prince Kashyap and Harish Chaudhary, to create an architectural innovation they call the ‘Green Shield’.

“We got the idea from the concept of thermos flasks and how water inside these flasks stays cold. For our prototype, we built special walls with a gap of 2 inches between them. These can be the usual brick and cement walls but need to have a 2-inch

gap in between that would be filled with single-use plastic. This would not only help us reuse plastic sustainably but would also create strong yet heat resistant walls,” says Prince.

Plastic is a bad conductor of heat, and that allows the walls, and in turn, the interiors of the house, to stay cool irrespective of the high temperature outside.

“Although this is still at a prototype stage, we hope to scale up this innovation to create a model region for the rest of the country to follow. This way, we are combating extreme heat on the one hand, while are also reusing an environmental burden!” says Harish.