Sustainable Living Starts with our Kitchen: Managing our Kitchen waste (Organic Waste) effectively for a better and safer tomorrow!

Genesis of my curiosity:

My grandmother had a major health treatment recently and during the treatment, she was fed liquified vegetables and fruits through a tube injected into her trachea. Food preparation for feeding her through a narrow tube resulted in a lot of vegetable and fruit waste, close to one to two kilos daily. This waste was nutrient-rich, and I converted it into a liquid and fed it to the plants and trees in the backyard for a week. This turned my backyard into a stench as most of the content remained over the soil and became a breeding ground for insects and fungus. This practice of converting waste into liquid and using it in the backyard was not possible every day, and later we disposed of the waste through the waste disposal methods we followed earlier. A usual practice at home is for us to put all the waste, including kitchen waste, any paper/plastic or other waste, into a plastic cover and hand it over to the waste collection van that goes to every house in our gated community daily.

Being curious, I observed this over a few days to see how this waste is collected and dumped into the waste collection van and inquired the van driver about what they do with the collected waste. It was shocking to learn a few things from the conversations with the van driver, and with my parents and others:

1. The collected waste is gathered at various points in the city which finally goes to a waste management facility to process and recycle it. While plastic and paper are recycled into relevant products, the organic waste (including kitchen waste) is converted into compost or other useful material.

2. While this sounded good, I learned from the conversations and the material available online that waste management and recycling is a major challenge as most of the waste is not segregated in households and it reaches the destination in a mixed format making it very difficult for segregation and processing.

3. I learned that most organic waste may remain unprocessed and dumped into the landfills at select places in the city outskirts creating severe environmental and health hazards for the surroundings including severe damage to the soil and ground water in addition to the pollution in surrounding areas. I could connect this with my learnings from geography classes in earlier grades

Simple math and scary learnings

I tried imagining what could be the total waste going to landfills every day. Our gated community alone has 270 houses and if each house is contributing to 0.5 or 1 kg of kitchen or organic waste per day, it amounts to 135 kg to 270 kg per day. This in a year is close to 50,000 kg to 100,000 kg or 50 to 100 tons of organic waste just from our gated community.

I got even more curious, and I attempted to calculate how much all the gated communities in Hyderabad might be contributing in a day or for the entire year. I found from a quick internet search that Hyderabad may have nearly 500 gated communities of various sizes. A few apartment complexes where my friends are staying currently have more than 1000 apartments each. I took an average of 250 houses or apartments per gated community, and we may have about 1,25,000 houses just in gated communities. Some of these communities are being developed currently and I assumed their occupancy for these estimates.

Considering an average household organic waste of 0.5 kg to 1 kg every day, all these houses together could contribute to 62,500 kg to 1,25,000 kg per day and a staggering 22,812 to 45,625 tons of organic waste per year. Imagining a good portion of this waste going to the landfills in as-is condition was scary.

Surprisingly, even more simple solutions to the problem

This further intrigued me to look for more information and I had more conversations with my parents and others. A quick internet search (in simple words, organic waste processing in internet search) taught me that several simple and easy solutions exist to handle this waste. Several search results indicated composting as the solution for processing organic waste and several videos and content showed how organic waste converters work and how easy it is to produce compost from household waste. While my parents had no immediate answers to my questions on how much it would cost to have an organic waste processor or convertor in our gated community, they pushed me to look for this information again on the internet. I relied back on the internet to check for this information and learned that it could cost anywhere between 5 to 10 lakh Indian rupees (or 6500 to 13000 USD) to process 250 kg of organic waste per day generated from our gated community. My father advised me to include any financial information in the globally accepted currency as well to make it easier for global readers to understand.

If we have to set up this organic waste processor in our gated community, it will cost less than 4500 rupees (55 USD) per house as a one-time cost, which is less than the bill for a one-weekend dinner with the family. Reading the material about these devices also indicated a running cost of approx. 40,000 rupees (520 USD) per month, which again is 150 rupees (2 USD) per house. 

These learnings became even more interesting and pushed me to do further study on why these devices are not in our gated community. Further conversations with my parents and gated community maintenance staff indicated that they only have a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) that recycles sewage from all households and converts it into clean water for use for gardening in the community. I understood that having an STP is necessary as per government rules. However, the government does not require gated communities to have organic waste processors as they have arrangements to collect such waste every day from all households including gated communities.

Even my parents became quite curious about my findings and our conversations led to the following thoughts:

1. Having organic waste processors within gated communities will reduce the load of approximately 45,000 tons of waste, from just the gated communities in Hyderabad per year, collected, transported and either processed centrally or disposed at landfills.

2. Having such facilities within the gated communities will help in reducing the health issues for people who are currently collecting and traveling with this waste every day. From what I observed, the waste collectors do not wear any gloves or masks while collecting the waste or when they travel in these vans which might be causing severe health issues for them in the future.

3. Electricity consumed and greenhouse gases generated from running organic waste processors could be similar to the fuel consumed and greenhouse gases generated by the vans used in the collection and transport of waste every day.

4. Material from organic waste processor creators indicated that the weight of waste after processing can be reduced by 70% and the volume of waste can also be reduced to 80% meaning that 45,000 tons of weight can be reduced to 12,000 tons after it is processed using organic waste processors.

Bigger curiosity

The next big curiosity was what happens to the compost that is created every day if this waste processor is set up in our gated community. A quick search on the internet and learnings from discussions taught me the following:

1. From the organic waste generated from our gated community, organic waste processors will help produce approximately 60 kgs of compost every day (from 250 kg of waste), which can be used by all the houses in the gated community for their gardens, plants, and trees and it can be used for the lawns and trees across our gated community.

2. Thanks to learning from my geography classes, I remember that degrading soil quality is a major problem in our country. If the government collects this compost (in place of collecting waste) and uses it for trees and parks across the city or to the nearby villages for use in agricultural lands. It will help in improving soil fertility. Several uses are there for such compost than for the waste going to landfills.

3. If organic waste is managed locally within our gated community, collecting paper and plastic waste could become easier as it is not mixed with organic waste anymore and such paper or plastic collection may be done once a week or once in fifteen days rather than every day and processing such segregated waste may be simple as well.

I became even more curious about why this is not done when there are so many benefits from managing organic waste within the gated communities and why the government is not strict on gated communities having this machine, similar to the Sewage Treatment Unit. Do all the hotels and eateries in the city that generate large volumes of organic waste have these organic waste processors? I am curious and will be happy to learn from your responses.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Google Docs for some language correction, inputs, and interesting conversations with my parents, support staff in our gated community maintenance team, and more importantly van driver who is playing a key role in collecting waste from our gated community.

References:

• https://www.epw.in/engage/article/institutional-framework-implementing-solid-waste-management-india-macro-analysis#:~:text=While%20the%20%E2%80%9Chigh%20income%E2%80%9D%20group,lesser%20recyclable%20waste%20every%20day.

• https://www.peacecorps.gov/educators/resources/trash-corners-organic-inorganic-or-toxic/#

• https://recykal.com/blog/waste-collection-india-waste-management/#:~:text=The%20collected%20waste%20reaches%20the,of%20waste%20in%20the%20system.

• https://www.activesustainability.com/environment/landfills-serious-problem-environment/?_adin=02021864894

• https://www.nextias.com/blog/waste-management-in--india/#:~:text=The%20biggest%20problem%20with%20waste%20in%20India%20is%20the%20inadequate,landfills%20instead%20of%20being%20recycled.

• https://www.plantchicago.org/post/waste-system-comparison-us-india

• https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/environment/5-recycling-lessons-from-different-countries-in-the-world/

• https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/telangana/waste-to-energy-plants-at-jawaharnagar-to-bring-city-garbage-to-zero/article66357459.ece