Waste to Money

Waste to Money
Supreeth was a well settled man. He had a good “9-5 government job” with a happy family and a
new born daughter. Whatever personal ambitions he had, was achieved by now. However, he
thought, now is the time to move up the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He wanted to do
something for others and the society. That he was quite a tinkerer helped him in his next ambition. He
had solved the solid waste management problem in his home by buying an organic waste composter
from his own pocket. His wife, a hobbyist gardener, by utilizing the manure from bio composter, curated a small garden of flower plants, tomato, bhindi, brinjal etc in their backyard.

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On a typical day, while Supreeth was walking to his office, a kilometer away from his residence, he
couldn’t help but cover his nose from the stench emanating from the roadside solid waste dump yard.
He cursed the apathetic municipality, the public, the government and the hapless safaikarmacharis. The efforts of the municipality to tackle solid waste were far from successful. The temporary solution of relocating the waste to a landfill outside the city was protested by the neighbouring villagers. Waste segregation at source wasn’t picked up by the households. It didn’t help that the city leadership had more pressing and immediate problems like drinking water supply, traffic management, disappearing water bodies. If he can be such a responsible citizen, why can’t everyone else in the society be so, dreamt Supreeth standing on the footpath and staring at the sky. An epiphany of sorts occurred to him. He called his boss and applied for a Casual Leave then and there. He took a U-turn to his home. Determined to tackle this issue, he donned his tinkering hat. He thought, his solution to Solid Waste Management should be scalable, simple and lend itself of economies of scale. Implicit in such solutions is the large scale employment generated. He took a middle path. Not the Macro solution at the level of municipality, nor micro-solution at the household level. Because neither had an incentive to solve the problem. His solution was somewhere in between.

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His scheme was something like this. Every 40-50 households in his locality to have a community organic waste composter bought by pooling in nominal contribution. Couple of safaikarmcharis to be hired to collect segregated organic waste from each household every day. Both the households and
safaikarmcharis will be trained to do their part. A core committee will be formed to monitor the implementation and progress.

To incentivize the households to segregate waste, it was decided that a fixed quantity of organic manure will be given in return to be used in their personal gardens. Those who do not want composted organic manure, will be given monetary reward, once the business model scales up. Supreeth had even thought of monetizing his idea. He approached a startup like Ninjacart, which specialized in facilitating direct market linkage between farmers and consumers. He told them that, Ninjacart can help in buying organic manure produced by the resident’s associations and supplying them to farmers engaged in organic farming. Founders of Ninjacart were thrilled at the idea and agreed to experiment it. Supreeth took his residents welfare association Chairmen into confidence. He placed his idea, rather business model to him and other close friends. Everyone smiled and after a little nudge, rolled up their sleeves. Let’s get this done everyone, exclaimed the Chairmen!

Note & Ack: The style of presentation of this innovative proposal is inspired by the book ‘India Can’ by Sh. Ravi Nawal

Appendix
Ninjacart – http://ninjacart.in/
Ecobin – https://myecobin.in/
Safaikarmcharis – The people engaged by Municipalities to clean the city and pick up solid waste from
households
Chintan – A NGO engaged in training safaikarmcharis to handle solid waste.