Welcome to Pune — a city where tradition meets innovation, and where the stories of sustainability are written in its streets, its communities, and its quiet acts of care.
When: February 23-28, 2026 (with the option to arrive early or leave later and travel on your own).
Ticket price: 9000 SEK including hotel with breakfast, packed lunch, local travel, local fees and taxes (excluding cost for international travel) Limited amount of tickets available
How: Follow the instructions for payment of stay and program (included in the 9000 SEK) in India (see details below). Then book your own travel, flight, decide on whether you want come early or leave later, or just stay for the week.
Sign up for updates and instructions on how to buy a ticket: https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/8896766
The Travel and Learn concept is jointly developed by Sonali Phadke, studio Alternatives, and Daniel Mossberg, CEMUS, Uppsala University. Read more further down on this page.
CEMUS, Uppsala University explicitly disclaims all responsibility and liability for the participant’s international travel arrangements, including, but not limited to, flight bookings, travel dates outside the specified program window, and any associated costs or logistics related to reaching and departing from Pune, India; conversely, studio Alternatives is solely responsible for all local travel arrangements, accommodation, and all other services included in the ticket price.
The Upcycle Sustainability Pune Tour invites you to step into this living laboratory of change — to see how individuals, collectives, and organizations are reimagining waste, water, food, and everyday living. Over the course of six days, you’ll engage with local changemakers, recyclers, artisans, and educators who are building a more circular, equitable, and resilient city.
Through field visits, workshops, and reflective sessions, you’ll discover how waste becomes resource, how design becomes dialogue, and how simple, grounded action can transform systems. Each stop along the tour — from upcycling studios to community compost sites — offers a new lens to understand sustainability not as a distant goal, but as a lived, local practice.
This journey is as much about learning as it is about unlearning — questioning the linear ways we produce and consume, and finding creative ways to reconnect with the materials, people, and ecosystems that sustain us.
We hope that by the end of this experience, you will carry not just knowledge, but a sense of responsibility and possibility — to continue these practices in your own communities and professions.
Welcome aboard — let’s walk, learn, and reimagine the city together.
About studio Alternatives
studio Alternatives is a multifaceted firm working in the areas of creative reuse and design. We have our own workshop with highly skilled and trained craftsmen. In addition to design consultancy, we also execute all scales of projects, products, furniture, accessories, artifacts, installations and customised space-making elements. We believe that along with an interesting and unique concept, it is equally important to have the ability to deliver excellent detailing and very fine quality work.
We love upcycling. Utilising various types of discarded materials to create desirable objects has been our passion. We have been working on upcycling of discarded materials since 2010 and have worked with a varied range of discarded materials such as packaging, thermocol, foil wrappers, glass bottles, tires, plastics, fabric, wood and metal, to name a few. To put it in a nutshell, our work with reclaimed materials, ranges right from coasters to large shipping containers.
Till date, we have executed a vast array of projects such as upcycled shipping container spaces, complete interior design with the theme of upcycling and designing of corporate gifts from discarded materials. Some of the most meaningful projects were those where we could design and make useful furniture/artefacts from the clients’ own discarded materials.
Read more: https://www.studioalternatives.com/
About CEMUS, Uppsala University
The Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), is a student-initiated, interdisciplinary centre at Uppsala University, with the explicit ambition to contribute to a more just and sustainable world. Student-faculty collaboration weaves as a golden thread through the history and organization of all activities at the centre.
Since its inception in the early 1990’s, the centre has initiated and expanded the space for transdisciplinary student-led higher education as well as research and collaboration that transcends traditional academic disciplines and boundaries between academia and society at large.
Read more: https://www.cemus.uu.se/about/
About the Travel and Learn Concept
The Travel and Learn concept aims to create engaging and eye-opening learning journeys in collaboration with long-standing international partners that have worked with CEMUS at Uppsala University with different types of projects and exchanges. It was jointly developed by Sonali Phadke, studio Alternatives, and Daniel Mossberg, CEMUS, Uppsala University.
The main activities center on travelling and learning about specific interdisciplinary topics and challenges, as well as engaging directly with local communities and actors on the ground, seeing sustainability as a lived practice. Visits and local collaborations involve universities, schools, businesses, local government, and NGOs in and around the area, working with climate, environmental and sustainability challenges.