Ross: You know how you throw your jacket on a chair at the end of the day?
Joey: Yeah...
Ross: Well, like that, only that instead of a chair it’s a pile of garbage. And instead of a
jacket it’s a pile of garbage. And instead of the end of the day it’s the end of time, and
garbage is all that has survived.
The afore-written is an excerpt from the popular Sitcom Friends where the character Ross Geller dates a girl who lives in a house of garbage. Well, that made for some quick laughs but it actually can be extremely terrorising when the same translates to reality.
In a world getting into crazy levels of consumerism without any thought for how the products ultimately go through the disposal/reuse cycle, we are accelerating towards Ross’s imagination of “garbage is all that survived” world.
Our apartment complex — The Central Park South (TCPS) — which is a block of 172 apartments is difficult to miss when one reaches the end of Elcot Avenue in Sholinganallur. But this location proved to be a bane during the floods of 2015 when we were one of the most-affected apartment complexes with more than 5 feet of water entering the complex and causing huge havoc.
We were forced to ask ourselves why this happened. Some of the answers were obvious: Unplanned development, encroachments of wetlands, which are natural sinks, poorly designed drainage systems and clogging of drainage systems with waste.
We thought of what we could start doing immediately.
We thought of a Project Zero waste. Even prior to the floods, we had a process in place for segregating dry waste. After the floods, we decided to take it to the next level by implementing a three-level segregation system.
Implementation
We adopted the 2bin1bag model which uses 2 coloured bins — green and red to collect organic and reject waste respectively and a bag to collect the recyclables. A core team of 10-12 enthusiastic residents was formed.
Initially, the implementation plan was formulated and extensive door-to-door campaigning was done to educate the residents, housekeeping staff and the maids or cooks working here. For the first 50 days after the process implementation, active volunteers accompanied the housekeeping staff to every door to clear the doubts and re-educate, wherever required.
Reports were sent on day-to-day basis through a WhatsApp group between the block representatives and the housekeeping staff.
The next challenge was to effectively use the 80-100 kg of organic waste that was being collected every day. Our apartment complex does not possess the infrastructure to carry out in-house composting. We decided to approach the Corporation office at Sholinganallur to help us out.
We invited the Corporation officials to come and see our process. With constant pushing by our president Rakesh Ohri, we were able to make the Corporation collect our organic waste and send them it to the Semmanchery Composting yard.
One part of the organic waste is used in trench composting wherein a pit of about 4’x4’ with a depth of two to three feet is dug and every day about 20 kg of organic waste is dumped into it. This is then covered with dry leaves and mud. This process is continued till the pit is full and closed.
Impact
90 % of the organic waste we generate is normally converted to compost and we have patches of extremely nutritious and fertile soil in our garden. Our recyclables fetch us about ₹ 2500 to ₹3000 per month.
This amount is given as incentive to the housekeeping staff. Most importantly, we have saved over 15 tons of waste from going to the landfill.
Trench composting increases the water absorption capacity of the soil thus preventing flooding of water during rain. With the help of Anita Sivakumar, a gardening enthusiast and resident of TCPS, we use this patch to grow veggies such as okra, radish, cucumber, bottle gourd as well as various varieties of spinach.
And last but not the least, these initiatives have planted the seeds of sustainability not just in the garden but also in the minds of the children of the complex who have been playing an active role in the process.
So, in the end, we could happily tell Ross – well, garbage is still daunting but we at TCPS aren’t giving that up without a fight
(All activities wouldn’t have been possible without the active participation of our resident-volunteers namely Unnikrishnan Ravindranath, Subha Sridhar, Sridhar Santhanam, Lakshmi Ramachandran, Smita Tiwari, Jayashree Vijay, Anitha Sivakumar, Alamelu Jayaraman, Narayanan R, Chitra Balasubramanian, Balaji Balasubramanian and Renuka Sundaramurthy while being ably supported by the Association President Rakesh Ohri and Secretary Karthik Ramachandran.
And, we have been lucky to have motivating neighbours such as the Ceebros Belvedere and The Central Park West and their active volunteers Ashwin Sekar and Benazir Tehrani who never hesitate to share their best practices.)
(Sumitha Iyer is a resident of The Central Park South)