All World
Gayatri Pariwar

When garbage is dispersed around, it pollutes the environment, spreads foul smell and spoils the appearance of the surroundings. On the other hand, cleanliness adds to the elegance of the place. To deal with this ever increasing problem of garbage, nation-wide cleanliness drive has already been launched. Moreover, numerous groups have joined this movement and are trying to find out various unique ways of waste management.

In this context, the management of worn-out flowers is worth mentioning. Flowers are daily offered in various places of worship across the nation. These are eventually either disposed of as waste or thrown into the rivers. So, they are neither subjected to proper utilization nor do they benefit anyone. They just add to the splendor of the temple for a single day. However, they create severe environmental hazards because they often contain pesticides, which pollute our rivers. To prevent this pollution and to deal with the floral waste generated in temples, two youths of Kanpur came forward. Ankit Agarwal (26) and Karan Rastogi (28), launched a company, ‘Help us Green’ in May 2014. This company collects flowers from various temples and mosques of Kanpur every day, which are then sorted by about 1200 women. About 60% of them are subjected to vermicomposting, while the remaining 40% are processed to manufacture incense sticks and havan samagri. For their outstanding contribution, Agarwal and Rastogi got the ‘Tata Social Enterprise Challenge Award’ for 2015-16. Now, the Uttar Pradesh government is in talks with them regarding land allocation for processing flowers in Banaras and Kannauj. In 2014, this company had a turnover of 80 thousand bucks, which rose to 6.3 million in 2015. There was a substantial increase in 2016.

Vani Murthy of Bangalore has set another adorable example. Once when she was passing by a local landfill in 2009, she noticed that the pile of waste had grown as big as a mountain and was still increasing. That was the day when she decided that she will not send the waste from her house to swell this heap anymore. From then onwards, she began the process of converting her kitchen waste into manure. Moreover, she used this manure to cultivate organic vegetables on her terrace. Further, in order to tell people about it, she uploaded videos of the process of manure manufacture on YouTube. Few days later, she founded an institution, ‘Solid Waste Management Round Table’.

This Institute, of which Vani is the founder member, aids the government and local bodies in waste management. Last year, it began the ‘Swachata Abhiyan’ (cleanliness campaign), in which people are motivated to convert their household waste into manure and then cultivate pesticide-free vegetables using it. This initiative is helping to contain the size of the landfills on the one hand, while on the other, it is also providing an opportunity to the people to consume organic vegetables. Through this move, the fifty- four year old Vani wants to usher green revolution in homes and decrease the amount of kitchen waste. The movement soon showed its effect. As a result, a large number of people in Bangalore have begun to sort out their household waste. Many of them have begun to use the manure produced from kitchen waste in cultivating organic vegetables and augmenting soil fertility.

Millions of people live in our country and almost everyone wear shoes. The rich have multiple pairs of footwear, while among the economically vulnerable sections, only a few people are fortunate enough to have even one pair. The 23- year old Shriyansh Bhandari of Mumbai turned this disparity into a mission. He began the mission of refurbishing the old shoes and giving them to the poor. For implementing this task, Shriyansh founded an NGO ‘Green Sole’ in the year 2014. His work is based on his observation that the sole of the shoes of most people remains intact, but the footwear gets torn from the sides. This is the reason why people have to throw about four to five pairs of footwear in waste every year. From here, he got the idea of launching the Green Sole. This company has four shoe collection points in Mumbai. At these centers, people leave their old, used and torn footwear, which are then repaired and renewed. For this process, the company takes help from various shoe companies of the city. The institute then distributes the repaired shoes among the poor children. But, this task also helps in combating the problem of waste management. Every year, about 350 million pairs of shoes are damaged and hence disposed off as waste across the globe. This substantially swells the waste deposit. On the other hand, about 1.5 million people of the world are suffering from foot related problems only because they cannot afford footwear. The initiatives and efforts of Green Sole have helped a lot in dealing with this challenge. The forty six year old Sonu Kapila requested the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram to allocate land to set up waste management plant in 2014. When no action was taken on his request, he began a movement in 2015 to push his case forward. Consequently, in July 2015, the Municipal Corporation allocated land to him for setting up the plant. The expenditure for this plant was about Rs. 2-2.5 million, for which he went out to the people and got sufficient donation. The project was inaugurated within one month of getting the land, i.e. on 15th August, in the presence of high officials of the district administration and the Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation. This colony is spread in an area of about 290 acres, in which there are about 1,100 plots. They house over one thousand families. It has a total population of about 4500. About 2 tons of green waste and 1 ton of kitchen waste is generated from here on daily basis. Since the operation of the plant about 9000 kgs of manure is produced daily. This is used in the garden of the colony. So, now, there is no requirement to purchase manure from outside. Today, about 96% of its waste is being degraded within its locality and this has proved to be an important milestone in providing pollution-free atmosphere to the people. In the previous year, they have also installed solar panels to conserve the conventional sources of energy.

Forty- six year old Sujay Jha and his companion Amit Parasnath of Allahabad thought of providing a commercial solution to the process of waste disposal of their city. For this, they began a company, ‘Hari Bhari Recyclable Private Limited’. This enterprise, which began its operations in October 2015, provides the service of collecting garbage from houses. Presently, the company is providing its services to about 1.5 lakh houses at only 32- 50 rupees monthly charge. To ensure that waste is being collected from every house daily the company has used the NFC technology. In this process, NFC machines have been installed in the houses of every subscriber, in which the company’s employee has to register his presence every day. Presently, this company is collecting about 600 tons of waste, which includes biodegradable kitchen waste and other types of wastes, which could be safely burnt. The organic waste is then subjected to produce manure. The consequence is that their city, Allahabad was found to be the cleanest city in the Cleanliness Survey of 2016.

In all the initiatives mentioned above, the greatest challenge was of waste segregation that is the process of separation and classification of waste, so that they could be recycled properly. The techniques and procedures employed to clean India are really worth applauding. Implementing an idea is a real challenge and the examples mentioned here have actually achieved what they contemplated. Today, the country needs such leaders of cleanliness, who could transform the mounts of filth into industrial raw material and make concrete contribution in cleaning the country. This would also inspire all our countrymen to bring about cleanliness revolution. These examples are not only inspirational, but they even motivate people to think in different ways to manage the waste scattered around them.