Rashida Adil, Nashik, Maharashtra, India
Rashida Adil is an ambassador of the Global Sustainability Award and a volunteer with Project Rise Nashik. For over two decades, she has turned discarded bottles, CDs, and buttons into art, teaching, and a quiet environmental movement across her community.
Waste is not waste unless I waste it. A discarded compact disc can become a poster or a wall hanging. An empty glass bottle becomes a planter. Thousands of buttons, sorted carefully by colour, become mosaic portraits. I've even turned old garments into reusable bags without a single stitch.
For me, an object isn't wasted until it's been given a second purpose.
I can say that I am blessed with making good art. I have not done any special courses, but the moment I see something, I can create something out of it. That instinct followed me through life, and it found urgent use during the Covid-19 pandemic, when art shops closed and teaching moved into homes.
Instead of suspending my lessons, I found creative ways to work with the materials my students already had at home. I would ask them to bring things like glass bottles, old CDs, or other discarded items, and together we would turn them into something new. One of our projects was a horse made entirely from electronic waste collected by the students, using old motherboards, keyboards, wires and other discarded parts.
In 2009, I formally brought upcycling into the curriculum at Sharjah Indian School in the UAE, where I headed the art and craft department. I had two challenges. A lot of the students were largely indifferent to art. So, I stopped spending on materials altogether, buying only basic adhesives and sourcing everything else from household waste. My children were very, very happy knowing that they don't have to go out of the way to buy anything, so whatever is in the house, we can just take it and go.
The projects we built were ambitious. My students and I made the UAE national flag out of 65,000 buttons. We collected 5,000 glass bottles, painted them, and gave them out as planters to the public and law enforcement officials. A portrait of Mahatma Gandhi made from 5,000 recycled buttons was presented to the then Indian Consul General to Dubai, Aman Puri. Another installation of 10,000 bottles rendered the image of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Eventually the scale of it persuaded our headmaster to formally add waste management to the curriculum. I was later named an ambassador of the Global Sustainability Award and received a prize of 15,000 dirhams from an environmental organisation.
My work has never stayed inside a classroom. I've run workshops for patients experiencing severe depression, for people on the autism spectrum, and for older adults in care homes across Nashik. In every setting, I become convinced that making something, no matter your skill level, is a form of communication, and often of healing.
Joining Project Rise in Nashik has given me a great sense of purpose. I keep coming back to small, repeatable actions — carrying cloth bags to gatherings, repurposing garments into carriers, cutting single-use plastics from daily routines.
When I began including students in these projects, I saw that their energy and enthusiasm created a ripple effect everywhere they went. That might be the best part of what I do, to watch it move past me into other hands.
Over twenty years, I've repurposed waste into art. But what I've really built, if I'm honest, is a way of seeing. Once you learn to look at something discarded and ask what it could still become, you can't really unlearn it.
Because, the waste is never a waste. Not unless you waste it.
