Traversing Sustainability with an Urban Farmer
hello
i’m vani murthy and i am an urban farmer
i live on the third floor of an
apartment and i compost my kitchen waste
and i grow my food
most of the waste that we generate is
banked
in a plastic cover it could be a black
bag or it could be a polythene bag
and this bag travels and i’m going to
talk to you about the story of where
this
this bag actually goes and what it does
to the environment
so most of the times we leave it outside
our homes
and by the next morning the dogs have
ripped it open and it is thrown
all over the road another place where
this bag ends is in some drains
and you know when it rains the drains
get clogged it’s maybe because of these
bags
otherwise these bags end up in the
corner of our street
where many people dump their garbage and
sometimes it gets burnt
and it creates air pollution another way
uh the bag travels out of our homes
is in the trucks it goes out to the
landfills
and landfills are very contaminating
place
there is also a bag that goes into the
lakes
once i was walking in the sankey tank it
is
it is a lovely lake and just
above me a bag came trashing into the
water
and somebody had just chucked this bag
from the fence above
so it also ends up in water bodies
in rivers in oceans and everywhere
it pollutes and what really happens at
the landfill
it is just a dumping yarn the city’s
waste gets collected
and lorries and lorries go and dump the
waste it’s all in mixed form
and there is the organic waste that
comes out of our kitchen
that starts to break down in anaerobic
conditions
and methane gets released and methane is
one of the greenhouse gases
that contribute to the global warming
and we are all seeing the climate change
we are all seeing such
erratic climates around and one of the
reasons is
methane which is 24 25 times worse than
carbon dioxide
and in this landfill i visited 10 years
back
and i’ll give you a sense of what it
feels to be there in that muck
it is surrounded by villages it’s in the
outskirts of a city
and it is mountains of garbage it’s just
mountains of garbage
and you know there is a black
liquid that runs off these landfills
that enter our groundwater and it seeps
into the soil around
and most of the people in those villages
are growing our food
when you pump water in their bore wells
you get a black liquid
that shows how much of this dark fluid
which is highly toxic
entering the ground water so you can see
that the landfill is a place where
uh it it pollutes the air the water
and the soil that grows our food and
whatever we are throwing out is
somewhere coming back to us
in some form of the other and it’s
extremely important for us to understand
this
before we take an action uh to you know
say that we will contribute positively
uh to the climate change now that we
have seen all the problems
that waste generates or waste creates to
the environment and to the people
on this planet let us look at the
solutions that
we have and uh every citizen on this
planet becomes a part of the solution
because
he is a generator of the waste and once
we recognize
that the waste that we generate can be
uh you know diverted away from these
landfills or getting dumped anywhere and
everywhere
recognize it as a great resource that
can recycle
it can be composted and we completely
take responsibility of the waste that we
generate
so there are simple things that we can
do uh you know on a
as a daily practice one look at waste
uh you know make a waste audit in our
homes and find out
uh what is it that we are generating
then we get to know
there are so many things that need not
be generated so we first
reduce the amount of waste one of the
ways
of reducing is to refuse anything that
is used once
and discard it they are the single use
disposables
uh that become a culture right now it’s
very convenient
so if we can just refuse these single
use
disposables will be generating less
waste and in spite of that we still have
waste
we look at different categories in which
they can be
you know aggregated there is this dry
waste
which is recyclable that can be going to
a recycling
center there is the wet waste that can
be composted
and also there is one one category of
waste which is a reject waste
which which needs to be actually given
to the municipality to be treated
so you can see we have reduced it almost
by 90 percent
because 60 of the waste that we generate
comes from our kitchen
it is our wet compostable waste and
another 30
is dry recyclables it is paper
plastic metal and glass and of course
the reject is a very small portion that
is 10
so if we can just reverse the entire
waste management
by reducing and understanding our waste
and you know diverting it away from the
landfill
composting is a very exciting activity
that all of us can do uh i am an
urbanite
and uh we we don’t i don’t have any
excuse
not to compost because when i look into
that black bag
i see resource i see wealth i see
health and i see livelihood because all
the three
things that that that you know gets
resolved
when you actually look at the black bag
as as as a fantastic resource
that need not get lost so we are uh
saving resources and we are also looking
at
uh you know creating something out of it
which
which which gives livelihood to the
people who work in the waste
and also by composting we are putting
back great organic matter
back into soil because today when you
look at agriculture
agriculture is completely uh modernized
there is so much of chemical fertilizers
being used
uh you know there is you know
the food that is grown is actually toxic
it is poison on a plate
because chemicals fertilizers pesticides
they all have become a part of our
agriculture which was not so
in in days uh you know where the
agriculture was
best practices were all the natural
methods of forming
where the organic matter was a big part
of the soil the soil was
alive it had microorganisms it had
earthworms it had everything that gives
a plant the nourishment
and the plant in turn gives nourishment
to us so that cycle has been broken
because of the degradation of land
there is no life in land and this
organic matter that we generate at home
can build that beautiful soil and grow
our food
so we understand what is food uh
how so when you compost that’s what you
learn
you learn that you are creating this
amazing magical living soil
which which which goes into your soil to
grow your food
and that how we also understand
that we need to put healthy food into
our body
not food that has so much chemicals
because today
there are so many uh issues with health
cancer being one of the big things that
happens
it’s all because so much of chemicals
are going into our body
so uh composting growing our own food
gives us a path to choose food that are
uh healthy with nutritious and
sustainable you know the food that’s
grown in a living soil is the
sustainable way
it regenerates uh the land uh there is
uh
the farming is natural and uh it is
there is not much of uh you know health
issues when you eat such
food composting is not a complicated
process composting is as simple as you
think it can be
it’s just a experiential learning there
is a learning curve
you you there are challenges which help
you to learn better
uh it is about understanding the
breakdown of organic matter
we just need to look at the process
itself
it is about the rich uh
peels the vegetable peels the fruit
fields things that come out of a kitchen
that uh you know have to be uh used
in in a particular process or in
particular conditions
and even if you have a small balcony we
all can compost
it’s about the greens which is high in
nitrogen and the browns
that is high in carbon so it’s your wet
peels
and the dry leaves that are all around
putting them together adding a culture
putting in microbes
to accelerate the process uh taking a
container because we all live in urban
spaces we don’t have ground
to compost and putting them together
introducing oxygen by turning the pile
and
yes that’s where magic happens because
all the microorganisms
start to break down the compost and it’s
so exciting to see
something that was in the form of fields
and
something that was waste that we would
throw away turns into this beautiful
black fold
a handful of this handful of this
uh has more microorganisms than the
number of people on this planet
so this is the living soil this is the
black hole
this is the one that you know needs to
be fed to the soil to grow our food
and uh all of us can compost
it is this so exciting to compost and it
is one of the best actions that we all
can take
every day because when you look at the
changes in the climate
we need to take action and every day we
can take an action
by composting our kitchen waste by
keeping away that sixty percent of the
waste that we generate
and converting into this amazing soil to
grow our food
food can be grown in the smallest spaces
that you have you can grow herbs you can
grow your tomatoes your chilis
you can start small again everything
as we learn we do as we learn and that’s
it so choice is a very powerful tool
and all of us can make the choice to
take a daily action
to make sure that we leave a better
planet for the future
there is a saying that we do not inherit
this planet but we
borrow it from the future and these
future generations that coming ahead of
us need to you know have something
uh worth living on this planet and we
can leave that better planet by taking
complete responsibility of the waste
that we generate
by recognizing it’s a great resource by
putting organic matter back into soil
and looking at a sustainable way of
living
it is putting less stress on the
resources and also
your regenerating soil so that’s a
win-win all the way
thank you