What do you do when you’ve got a whole heap of garbage lying around and you’ve got to sort through it all just to pick out the plastics, the organic wastes, the metals and everything else? Hardly an easy task, and it’s not exactly the kind of job you’d want to spend a Sunday doing. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of private and government waste disposal corporations end up needing to do: segregation. Worse, some of them don’t even bother doing it, instead dumping all that perfectly reusable waste into landfills. What are we doing about all this?
When you think about it, we’d never even get into this whole mess if we never made a mess in the first place. Why throw all your trash in one, big receptacle when you can divide it? Put all the vegetable peels and other organic stuff in one bin, all paper & plastic waste in another, and your metallic wastes in the third one. That way, when your local sanitation corporation needs to collect the garbage for disposal or recycling, they have their work cut out for them. It’s not that hard for you to do, either.
That’s exactly what waste segregation is. When you separate different categories of household waste by simply throwing different types of it in different bins, you contribute to a system where tonnes and tonnes of such waste is collected already segregated so that nothing gets thrown into landfills. This is what’s called total waste management.
Everyday, Indian cities and towns create mountains of waste. For this reason, most major apartment complexes and even offices in cities perform waste segregation. Usually we separate the biodegradable waste from the rest and put it into organic waste converters (OWCs). These convert all kinds of wet waste into a dry, powdery substance you can use to fertilise soil and grow crops or revitalise your garden. You can even sell organic fertiliser to farmers who are constantly in need of more resources for their produce.
Check to see if your apartment complex or the company you work at uses an OWC machine for all their wet waste disposal. And if they don’t, there are several manufacturers and distributors like Vennar, one of the biggest organic waste converter suppliers in Bangalore. They’re putting India’s metros at the forefront of the movement for sustainable living. The environment isn’t just something you hear about at climate change conferences and NGO drives. It’s the reason all of us are even alive today, and it’s not something we can afford to take for granted.
