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