Wet Waste – 60% of your daily garbage
No matter the size of your apartment or villa, you can and should try to manage your own wet waste. You might just discover that its a lot of fun as well! Dont let the nay sayers distract you. Smell, maggots, flies, rodents are what you might hear as problems. They just didn’t learn how to do this properly. Infact, the children might just do a better job of it. DONT FORGET THAT YOUR MAID HAS TO BE PROPERLY TRAINED FOR THIS.
From Waste to Gold
There are enough websites we list as resources below so we wont repeat what is not necessary and merely provide a summary here
- Wet Waste is anything wet. (Duh!) :). So this means, food leftovers – cooked or uncooked, veg or non-veg. It also includes any garden material such as leaves, grass clippings and any soil from the gardening. Here is a website that describes more.
- When this gets collected and the environment is right, magic happens and all that food becomes compost.
- Compost is nutrition on steroids for plants. You can put them on your potted plants or garden or just any plant outside if you dont want it yourself.
You could do this in any container or a pit in the garden. But to make our lives easier, we have some great resources available to us.
Just keep two of these in your kitchen
Arijit Mitra from Whitefield manufactures bins that make it easy peasey for us. Many of us in Bangalore and beyond already use it. The company is called Greentech Life. The way it works is that you keep adding your daily wet waste to this bin kept under the sink, packing tightly as you go along and sprinkling some bran based powder to keep the microbes going and once full, you just keep it sitting for a couple of weeks for “pickling”. At this time, you use a second bin to add your daily wet waste. Once pickled, you add some compost to it and set it outside and in a few weeks, voila you have compost. This is one of the quicker ways of composting. write to
Keep this or similar in your balcony or garden
Unless you have been living in a cave or under a rock, you should have heard of this group and Poonam Kasturi. Her bins are another option. Her store in Indira Nagar is a must visit as is her site. Great learnings. She has various types of bins – mostly pottery like. They look really pretty and depending on the amount of wet waste you will generate, you can choose one of many options. She has a loyal fan following and has a superb job of promoting this all important waste processing across the city and beyond. See a cool video to show your maid <iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/6ZuG8e-VZfg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
Follow Vani Murthy’s page for just additional learnings and getting plugged into the composting world.
If you are interested in local individuals who compost successfully and want to share information or exchange stories, please write to whitefieldrising@yahoo.com and we will hook you up.
If you have loved composting, consider growing your own vegetables! Many of us in whitefield are doing it in our terraces or unutilized patches of land. Its fun! The Smart bin guy above has a great product to put on you terrace to get you started on growing your own veggies.