Message in a bottle from 'Kavi The Poetry-Art Project'

What do you do with your liquor bottle when you’ve consumed its contents? You could reuse it for drinking water, which is nice. You could repurpose it as a planter, which is great. But here’s how you can do better. Send your used bottles to Kavi The Poetry-Art Project in Delhi, and they will turn them into glasses, bowls and platters. Not only do you get a pretty piece back, but you also prevent these bottles from ending up in landfills.

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You won’t be the only one, though. As many as 80,000 customers and around 1,000 corporate houses have already done that, saving as much as 140 tonnes of non-biodegradable waste thus far––a feat that’s been duly documented in The Limca Book of Records.

“We at Kavi are making conscious and constant efforts to be environmentally responsible. We also understand that while the concept of being sustainable may sound simple, achieving it may not be so easy, largely because many still don’t know how to go about it. This initiative is something to get you started,” says co-founder, Madhuri Balodi.

The product range is spirited, to say the least. A vodka bottle lit up from inside that makes for a cool lamp. Many times, it comes with a fun phrase painted on it. A wine bottle is chopped up into a whisky tumbler. A gin bottle becomes a snack bowl. Useful yet unique, each of these pieces make no pretence of hiding what it used to be in its previous life, making the products all the more quirky and covetable.

Really, it’s where creativity meets utility, recycling meets innovation, and poetry meets art. Hence, the name. “We make poetry come alive in living spaces as visual concepts. Each product can be personalised with a little note or poem,” says Balodi, adding that the idea is to promote a green lifestyle with a literary touch among young, urban, and, most importantly, conscious consumers.

They started small, about a decade ago, as a home studio in Delhi with three partners, Balodi, Amit Singh and Soumya Mukerji, all from a journalism background, who quit their jobs to start the dream project. It was registered as a company in 2018. However, while Mukerji quit along the way, Singh and Balodi continue to forge ahead with a team of 25 that coordinates with artisans, labourers and freelance workers who work with Kavi on an assignment basis.

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Their success has encouraged Singh and Balodi to look beyond bottles, and include plantable seed paper, cork and reclaimed wood in their collections as well. The brand retails through its website, kavipoetryart.in and also through major e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Flipkart.

To get in touch as to where to send your bottles, call 08800583579.