Last weekend I went to an open house by an organization called The Daily Dump. This is a small group that came up with a bunch of products to do 'composting'. Basically this is to take all the kitchen waste (ie. organic waste) in your home and handle it right there in your home by turning it into compost. Compost is a high quality fertiliser for plants. How to do this? Simple -- kitchen waste decomposes and over a time period becomes compost by itself.You just need to manage this process in order to fit it into the structure of the household and that's where this groups' products comes in. They sell a set of three pots that are stacked one on top of the other. You fill the first two pots with the waste and when it decays to a certain extent you transfer it to the third pot and give it some time (1 month - 3months) and it becomes compost.
Why would you want to do this? In Indian cities garbage disposal is a big mess, the government doesn't do a good job. So you see piles of garbage lying around creating a horrible, stinking, unsanitary mess. When the government does collect the garbage it ends up in a landfill which is bad for the environment. So if citizens take care of their own kitchen waste (which is typically a large part of the waste generated in the house), its a great thing. Personally I think its fantastic to be able to take your waste and watch it slowly transform intosomething as benign as compost. BTW, the waste goes down hugely in the process as you might expect, to 25% or less o f its original volume/weight.
So this group, the Daily Dump, was publicising its products in the open house. They had a bunch of interesting environment-oriented talks as part of the open house. One was by a guy called Vishwanath, who is apparently quite well known in rainwater harvesting circles in Bangalore. (You don't know what rainwater harvesting is? You can check out his site: rainwaterclub.com). Another was T.K.Ramkumar, one of the leading lights of Exnora in Chennai. I know Ramkumar from RIM, so it was nice bumping into him at Exnora.
It felt great to get into all this stuff. This is what I was missing so much in my soon-to-be previous life in software. We bought one of the pots sets and are waiting for it to be ready for pickup. I'm excited to be composting :-)
Update on Narmada and Bhopal: Medha Patkar and other NBA folk stopped their fast today. I'm not sure why, but they won a moral victory with the Union Goverment internal assesment pointing out flagrant violations in the rehabilitation work from what was to be done. Also the issue escalated in an interesting way with the Gujarat Chief Minister Modi going on a 51 hour fast as a counterpoint to the NBA. He's not a pushover, that guy. Anyway it seems its now up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to allow dam construction to continue or not.
The Bhopal folks also got an audience with the PM who agreed to some of their demands, so they called off their fast too.
I dunno how to call the game in both these cases.
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