Reduce your and your citys waste footprint

namaste

thank you tedx and ggsipu for having me

here

activist entrepreneur actually i’m both

and an accidental one at that and today

i’m going to talk about

how i became an accidental activist

entrepreneur

and how me and my garbage sisterhood are

trying to create

a cleaner and greener world

so 25 years back i was a student like

you

all i wanted was a fat paycheck and

global travel

by 2010 i’d achieved both and had become

a single adoptive mom

life was suddenly at a slow pace

and a friend moved into my community and

she said

you know when we were in new york we

were segregating a waste

why don’t we do it now so be careful

whom you’re friends with

because you don’t know what rabbit holes

they’ll take you down right

but i said sure and i rounded up few

more friends

and together we started doing research

on how can we rescue

part of our waste from going to dumps

getting uh and landfills i’ve also seen

a connection between every time that the

garbage was being

burnt in the neighborhood and my

daughter’s falling sick

so we all got together and found that

there were actually four communities in

bangalore

that were already segregating their

waste we learned from them

and we decided to implement in our

community of 540 homes

we’d been told and we’d heard it so

often right in india people don’t care

for environment india is a dirty country

so we didn’t expect too much of a

response we thought

maybe we’ll get 30 40 more households to

do it in a community of 540 homes

we were so pleasantly surprised we found

that

when we built a good system we put a

process

behind it spent effort in education

70 of the people wanted to do the right

thing

it did take them more effort and they

were willing to invest that

to do the right thing and that’s a

learning for life

which we’ve used often in our journey

so we implemented the system it was

complex

we were only segregating dry waste paper

plastic metal

glass evas cardboard

but we were glad some of it was getting

rescued

we called ourselves green bugs natural

name right

as few of us moved out of the community

they took the learning and they

implemented in their communities too

before we know it some other communities

wanted to implement it too

and we suddenly had a whole bunch of us

in our neighborhood

who were segregating our waste we came

together called ourselves

which means garbage free belinda

we started working together improving

the system

making it better looking at what were

the challenges and continuously

improving it to make it easier for

residents to do the right thing

during this process we found that while

we were segregating

we found the waste pickers the army we

had teamed up with

and they are the ones who actually

rescue tons and tons of dry waste

and move it to recycling were actually

mixing the waste

when we spoke to them we found that a

simple bottle like this

is three grains of plastic there is a

label

there is a bottle and there is a cap

they were separating our dry waste into

72 different categories

we also found that unlike u.s where

eighty percent of the waste

was actually driveways in india sixty to

seventy five percent of our waste

was actually wet waste it bears uh

right in u.s i would get pomegranates in

a plastic box

i would eat it and only thing left would

be a plastic box

there is in india i buy a pomegranate in

its nature provided shell

and what is left after eating the

pomegranate is just the peels

or the wet waste so we redesigned

and came together with a simple thing

we also did a 80 20 rule it says that

eighty percent of the problems can be

solved with twenty percent of the effort

twenty percent of the problems take

eighty percent of the effort

so there was sanitary pads diapers

construction waste

there was medical waste there was broken

glass

we said let’s club it all into a third

category called reject

let it continue to go to a landfill as

long as we can rescue the rest

and give it a proper destination so that

it doesn’t go to a landfill

so that’s what it became it became two

bin

and a bag a bag because you you can’t

put a pizza box in a 8 liter bucket

no no not the packaging that you

received with most of your e-commerce

today so that’s why we replaced the bin

with the bag for the dry waste

soon more and more communities were

segregating

uh our emails boxes were getting clogged

by sending all those emails and you know

all the pamphlets out so we created a

website it connected us with

similar initiatives across the city and

the movement really took off uh

not just in bangalore we started getting

calls and we would just teach them how

to do it

from across the india so gurgaon puna

mumbai

smaller towns started at ooty started

adopting it

now that we had started segregating and

it was successful

what next right we looked at the biggest

category which was

wet waste we tried composting at home

but i found i was a failure so so did

some of them

some people succeeded some people failed

but we wanted a large larger scale

solution

so we teamed up with a municipality and

found that there was a facility

which could process our wet waste we

started sending our weight waste there

around this time i also teamed up with a

city-wide group called swmrt or

solid-based management roundtable

which had volunteers from across the

city working towards what else

but managing waste responsibly

we launched a campaign so that people

can start composting the waste

simple reason municipalities still had

to catch up with us

we had started receiving complaints from

citizens i’m segregating but

is mixing the waste so we told people

just don’t give them the waste

just compost your wet waste at home

give your driveways to the waste pickers

and

let the municipality take the balance 5

to

fifteen percent of it which is left

uh we also found that there was a group

in city a very vibrant group which was

uh growing their own food

and we found that when people were

growing their own food

the tone changed there was beautiful

pictures of the flowers they’d grown

there was beet roots that they had

managed to grow somebody had

shown how to grow spinach so easily so

we decided to create a campaign called

swachagraha

you compost you grow you cook and it

the cycle continues we had a lot of

people in the city

adopting it we also found the need that

not enough people wanted to just use the

do-it-yourself methods

we had a host of entrepreneurs that came

up

for composting kits we saw a lot of

innovation there and we started

promoting all of it

as people started composting at home

they got familiar

they also started looking at the

composting solutions installed in their

communities

by law a lot of communities were

required to install it

but it had been defunct they started

reviving those

so we had communities after communities

now composting their

vet waste and creating compost which

they were using in gardens distributing

to

residents but they found that there was

a large bulk which was still left over

uh another swmaty colleague who’s in

really

close with soil she went and met some

farmers

asked them to relook at the city compost

without any plastic without any heavy

metals

contaminations so the farmers came they

took some samples they used it to grow

food and as they saw the results they

loved it

more and more farmers started coming and

our city compost

from communities started moving back to

farmers

from farm to fork back to farm

we’d achieved a circular economy there

in 2014 i quit work

to just give one year to waste

at the end of one year the lure of

foreign postings or high salaries in it

would no longer attract me i started

with some of my garbage sisters

a company a social enterprise to work on

what else

but waste so we looked at what do we

want to work on

and we found a common enemy which was

the plastic

the single used disposables people were

using it one time

throwing it but it was living in the

nature for 500 to 800 years

we had seen a campaign by volunteers

called rent a bag

we thought that was a great alternative

but it had failed we looked at it why it

had failed

and built a commercial model around it

and then we implemented it

in areas we found it was saving almost

50 to 60

of the plastic bags it also connected us

with plastic

haters across the city and there were so

many of them

so media helped as it carried articles

the news spread and we got more and more

people

from more and more communities coming

forward to get it implemented

in their areas in one of the wards we

found a health officer

she was extremely proactive she had

spoken to them

the elected representatives and asked

them to ban

some of these items which had no

destination which were not getting

recycled

we looked at it we loved it we supported

them with borrower back

but we also shared the information with

our plastic hater group we’d all come

together and we called ourselves

bangalore eco team

each one of them took it to their

elected representative to municipality

officers

in their area and we had war afterward

marching for plastic ban in their area

with the ground swell we did get our

plastic ban kanatka plastic band in

greenpeace rated it among the best in

the world so why we call it a plastic

ban

what you see is actually we are against

single use disposables

things that you use once and throw it a

plastic bag

like this which is reusable is just fine

in our book

your bathroom bucket which is plastic

but you use it again and again

is just fine what we were against is the

plastic cups the plates the disposables

which you would eat once and then it

would live in the environment

for the next 500 to 800 years we also

had a lot of entrepreneurs that came up

so small women sags came up which

started making cloth bags

uh we had volunteer groups who came

together and

created a byoc movement so uh bring your

own cup

bring your own cloth bag so it had

become

a really vibrant movement in that

movement some people started

green events where they could give you

reusable cutlery from that came plate

banks

where you could borrow steel cutlerian

plates if you were having a large party

or a function in your house

and we had a vibrant ecosystem of

volunteers and entrepreneurs

meeting the need of a plastic ban

so now that was taking care of our 80

percent of the wet waste and the dry

waste

we looked at our dustbin again the one

we’d ignored earlier

and found that it had primarily three

things by volume

are sanitary pads diapers and of course

the mixed party waste or the disposables

cutlery

so the plastic bag had taken care of the

third but

if you look at the sanitary pads and

diapers we found that there were

sustainable alternatives already

existing there was something that had

come from east

which was uh clock paths which were

reused and then there was something that

had come from the west

which is a menstrual cup a cup and a

clock pad

we also saw in the clock pad an

opportunity to create employment

so we trained in small town india called

harvard

a unit of women who started producing

these

as more and more women moved to a cup or

a

clock pad they told other women and soon

it was a nationwide movement

of a cup and a cloth pads and you got

cup voted the minute you got cupboarded

you would take to social media and share

it with 30 more friends

so this was wonderful this was great and

yet

our composters were suddenly giving us a

little trouble we found that the compost

was getting acidic

because of citrus peels the juice shop

guys had a problem because who would

take their citrus peels

and then when we did research we found

there was a wonderful

product called bioenzymes which people

across the world were making

what is a bioenzyme it’s an all-purpose

natural cleaner

made with what else but your citrus

peels

we started promoting it and we started

doing more research around natural

cleaners

we also found that there is a lot of

chemicals

in our household cleaners in our

personal care cleaners our shampoos our

soaps

which while they were making us clean

they were making our lakes dirty our

lakes were frothing they were catching

fires

so we started promoting natural cleaners

we again

got a whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs

that started making

shampoos and soaps at home

so isn’t it wonderful every time we go a

little green we create

more employment and suddenly you had a

big

movement around natural cleaners

creating more and more employment

so all done not really with kobe we’ve

seen kovid ways

we recommend cloth masks

but there is still a lot of work to be

done

there is multi-layer packaging we need

packaging which is either recyclable or

compostable

there is epr that needs to come into

place

to make sure all our dry waste is

actually getting recycled

we need being a vegan is of course you

know

the best for the environment right there

needs to be more products more solutions

to make it

easy for people like me who are still

not there

to become vegan so i hope in the next

five years i’m going to see a lot of

entrepreneurs

coming up from among you to create more

products and services

so that we can create a cleaner and

greener world

it’s your future we’re talking about and

it’s time you take charge for it

thank you