The Mumbai man Who spends every Saturday cleaning beaches so you don’t have to

Mumbai: What began with 12 people picking up broken Ganpati idols and plastic wrappers at Dadar Beach on September 3, 2017, has grown into a city-wide movement.

Chinu Kwatra, then 28, had walked along the shore after the festivities and decided to organise a cleanup. Nine years later, the initiative, Beach Warriors, has conducted over 2,000 cleanups across 450 weeks.

Today, the volunteer-led movement, run under Kwatra’s Khushiyaan Foundation, works across four Mumbai beaches — Dadar behind Kirti College, Prabhadevi, Juhu Koliwada and Juhu Silver Beach — every Saturday.

According to the campaign, more than one million people have been sensitised about waste management and more than 4,000 tonnes of waste have been kept out of the ocean.

Around 2020, Kwatra began experimenting with recycling the collected plastic. What was earlier sent to dumping yards is now washed, dried and sorted at a Material Recovery Facility in Thane, and converted into granules and sheets. The recycled material is used to make school and garden benches — a school bench uses around 25 kg of recycled plastic.

Last year, 300 benches were sponsored through the initiative. For 2026, the target is to reach 2,000 students with support from LIC and Backstage.

The team will hold its next major cleanup at Dadar Beach on September 26 at 8 am as part of The Better India’s #CivicSenseRevolution campaign.