Hyderabad: Meet Sahithi Snigdha Bhupathiraju, a sustainable lifestyle practitioner from Hyderabad who left her corporate career to join the environmental revolution.
Sahithi’s story goes back to her college years when she used to notice piles of waste, especially plastic lying scattered on her way to college every day. This led her to set sights on environmental sustainability.
This Electronics Engineering graduate went on to study green technologies and sustainability in Southern California. After gaining knowledge in renewable energy and green building certifications, she returned to India three years ago and since then has been running Waste Ventures India, a waste management social enterprise that is moving the country’s solid waste sector to models that are simultaneously environmentally and financially sustainable.
Since then, she and her team have been changing the paradigms in solid waste management.
“Though I am an engineering graduate, I didn’t want to settle in the software field but wanted to work towards the betterment of the environment. I wanted to contribute to the waste management space here. We join hands with corporate companies, gated communities, educational institutions and also waste pickers to provide recycling and composting solutions. We collect low-value plastics from waste pickers and generate more income for them. This helps in diverting waste from landfills,” says Sahithi adding that they’ve also partnered with municipalities and gram panchayats to set up waste zero centres where dry waste is collected for recycling and food waste is composted and sold to organic farmers while rejected waste is incinerated.
In recent times, there has been a tremendous increase in the generation of waste due to the e-commerce boom which eventually ends up in a landfill. There was an explosion in such waste during the lockdown, she adds.
Since late 2013, Waste Ventures India has averted more than 3,000 tonnes of waste from dumpsites in the country. The company also offers a digital doorstep recyclable pickup service. However, she feels that a lot has to be done still to make society environmentally sustainable.
Seeking the government’s support in strictly enforcing the solid waste management rules, she says: “Segregation of dry, wet and rejected waste at every household and its collection is very important. Recently, MA&UD Minister KT Rama Rao has launched Swachh autos that collect dry and wet waste separately. I hope to see more infrastructure at gram panchayat and municipality level and set up public-private partnerships for waste management infrastructure.”
Sahithi hopes to see Hyderabad as the cleanest city in India by 2025. “I will work hard to make that a reality,” she signs off.
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