What is Waste Management? Learn from Apartments in Bangalore
Bangalore city generates almost 3,500 tons of waste daily which is collected by the garbage collection vans and is taken to the landfill sites around the city for garbage disposal. With time, the availability of landfills for dumping waste is becoming difficult. Moreover, all the landfill sites are reported to be contaminating the underground water, land and air and thus are posing a challenge for the environment.
Over 75% of the total garbage is organic and can be decomposed. Considering this, some responsible communities have made their move towards zero waste by recycling kitchen waste themselves, instead of dumping it in the bins or just giving it away to the garbage collection vans.
One such community is Sobha Bellandur that has 11 Societies with over 1700 Houses and around 7000 residents. This neighborhood in South East Bangalore has a very comprehensive waste management system. The residents are
provided with black, white and green re-usable bags to separate their waste. The white bag is for paper and other related waste. The Black bag is for Plastic and electronic waste and the Green bag is for Kitchen waste. The green bags in which the organic waste is dumped gets collected by the housekeeping members of the communities and taken to the Organic Waste Converter (OWC) unit.
The OWC unit in this society has been installed by Excel Industries Ltd. If the company’s claims are to be believed then 40% of the waste comes segregated from apartments and the rest gets segregated manually. An organization named Saahas Bangalore is dedicated to solve this problem of solid waste. A team from Saahas performs the task of segregation of waste in each block of Sobha community and takes away the plastic bottles, paper, electronic waste etc. for the recycling. This is how these apartments are producing zero waste. This clearly shows that there is a lack of awareness among residents and they need to be educated about the importance of waste segregation.
How the process works:
Once the segregation of the waste is done the compost mixing machine is fed with feeder stock of compost along with a proportion of garden and kitchen waste. After the components are well mixed the mixture is kept in crates for fermentation and a little amount of water is added to the mixture after every 3 hours. The process of fermentation takes place naturally in almost 15 days to make the compost ready to be used in gardens of these societies. At present they are processing 18,000 kilograms of organic waste and producing almost 1,500 kilograms of compost every month.
A similar initiative is taken up by a group of progressive women; residents of Shakarnagar. They are trying to establish an Organic Waste Converter unit in there blocks and are going door to door to educate the residents regarding organic waste separation and waste management.
It is blissful to visualize all the apartments and houses in Bangalore taking such initiative of composting the organic waste and creating a beautiful, garbage free and healthy Bangalore.
Making this dream come true is not very expensive. It needs a mere one time investment of Rs. 2,000 per flat, to get one odorless composting system and around Rs. 100 every month for maintaining it. With this little investment you can remove almost 1500 dump trucks from the road, save the wastage of about 25 million liters of diesel by dump trucks, prevent contamination of water, land, air and get the pleasure of enriching the land with chemical free fertilizer produced as compost.
It’s a win-win situation. If each one of us take this initiative and make a sincere effort to wipe out these environmental hazards, it will not take long for India to be a zero waste country.
