This Kashmiri teenager aims to make cars from waste materials

Shahid ul Islam is a Kashmiri teenager who dreams to build eco-friendly ‘Made-in-Kashmir’ cars from recycled waste materials. Despite this ambition, he also wants to inspire other young innovators in the region to make a difference, to make Kashmir pollution-free.

Aged 16, Shahid is from the Thokarpora area in the Pulwama district of south Kashmir. He makes prototype vehicles from scrap materials and creates awareness on reusing the waste material.

As Shahid said, it is his childhood dream and it gives him the satisfaction that he is thinking about contributing a bit towards the society. The teenage innovator also says that whatever is used and then thrown away comes back to haunt the users, but there is an approach to neutralise the threat by reusing such materials.

Fond of vehicle-making, Shahid got some opportunities during the Covid-19 pandemic to focus on preparing a truck apart from a Mahindra Thar, a Jeep or a Casper. However, they were just prototypes and small-scale toy models. But, Shahid dreams big wants to scale up his innovations to a new level.

He wants to increase the range of products he makes and whenever he gets a host of things like batteries and motors to prepare the vehicles. Apart from using electronic waste to make car prototypes, Shahid also uses chips, rim, wood, plastic sheets, and several other non-biodegradable products. He collects these materials by taking walks to his school, instead of going there by bus or other transport mediums.

According to him it usually takes around 15-20 days or sometimes even a month to create the vehicle replicas. He dedicates two to three hours every day for this, at his room-turned-workshop where the boy turn trashes into car replicas.

Shahid not only wants other innovators to keep recycling waste but requests the Kashmir government to lend a helping hand to innovators like him to make the best possible use of discarded items and minimise the threat to the environment.

In a mission to make Kashmir and the world a better place, Shahid wants to encourage and inspire others as well to use recycled waste in an attempt to save nature. He also seeks the government’s help for this. “I see a great potential here. If the youth is nursed well, we could see a lot of opportunities banging the doors by making good use of inventions," he said to TRTWorld.

At a time, when the world is talking about recycling, reusing the waste materials in order to save nature, in whatever capacity possible, a dream what a young soul like Shahid sees and believes in, is truly encouraging and inspiring.