Buy and Sell Textbooks

We live in times where innovations and product ideas come with an important selling point: sustainability. This is one of the most important trends we began following in the last five years. Buildings, food packaging, clothing, furniture.. everything that can be manufactured is undergoing a rethink to pass a sustainability test.

This is one of the small ways us humans can live by in order to protect our habitat. And it's really a notion that was led by millenials who simply stopped supporting bussinesses that didn't look into sustainable efforts. 

Of course, the idea of sustainability emerged from recycling and upcycling, concepts we learned in school, its implementations we saw in various ways in real life. Such as in recycling bins in public spaces or putting an end to using plastic bags and reusing paper bags and so on. 

Simply put, sustainability and recycling are two important practices that we need to start habitualising in our daily lives, starting from our personal rituals down to how our offices operate. And it really does start with the individual. I'm positive that almost every person alive today has considered, even for a second, their consumption habits and how they could avoid needless waste and think of reusable elements. 

And that's amazing because it proves that behaviours change all the time guided by public awareness of issues that affect the world we live in. 

Today, think of some ways that you can minimize your waste, find solutions at home to replace objects (like plastic water bottles or disposable cutlery) with more sustainable ones, look at your clothing and furniture and how you can upcycle or donate. Everything that we own can survive a whole lifetime, in a good way and in a really negative way.

We're sharing one recent iniative by two students from the Dubai International Academy who became aware of the sudden surge of textbooks that were no longer needed by students. This is not a new issue, growing up we all wondered what cometh of our books, sometimes they were donated, and sometimes they were chucked in the garbage. With Mehul Advani and Paavnee Misra, they decided to try something different which was very reflective of the times they lived in. 

They turned to the online community to set up a space where students could buy and sell used textbooks. Many school books are costly, and this was a great way to have one unified platform for all book things for students. 

The initiative is called The Textbook Tree. You can reach out to them directly over their website, Instagram page or email them at [email protected]. It's still a project in its infancy but I would really push everyone to support them and help this space grow, much like a tree, until it has its roots all across the nation with textbooks that reach every child who needs one.