Let's do our bit
Perhaps, you also, crib about the living conditions we’ve to put up with everyday, when stepping out of the safe shell called our home. Today, being Environment Day, I’m sure there are millions of articles out there, claiming how the world could be made a better place to live in. Why not add my own small bit to the humongous effort, so I thought.
It all started when I moved to Bangalore (remembered as the ‘Garden City’ from my school General Knowledge textbooks), which according to the people living there for long, is nothing like what it was a few years back and is deteriorating in a rapid pace due to the population explosion. I lived in an area where I had to wait for the garbage collector’s whistle, so that I could dispose the garbage and a few minutes later on the way to office, I’d see all the garbage collectors assemble from different streets near a truck and segregate(!) the waste manually. And there would be huge piles of waste on the road sides — people crossing it everyday, food stalls at an alarmingly close radius to the dump, even more appalling when it rains. A very appalling picture on the whole.
This led to a series of questions. Why do we have to waste time every single day on the basic necessity of garbage disposal from home, waiting for the disposal truck, when I could be doing better things? Why does the government have to take care of this for every single household, when it could be doing better things? So, I started looking for options.
Apparently, these were problems that were being solved brilliantly by some organisations. Waste segregation at the individual household level is the first step to free the government workers from manually doing it. But, what after waste segregation? I still don’t want to be disposing garbage everyday. And then I remembered dad showing me a video on composting sometime back. Apparently, there’s only 10% of what we’re throwing, that has to go to the landfills. All the organic waste from home could be conveniently converted to compost and fed to the plants. True that, composting takes some time to get right, but when I started out and started seeking solutions for the different problems popping out of the compost bin, I found that there were a lot of good resources out there to help. These are some of the resources that will help starters.
MyEcoBin Indoor Bokashi Compost Bin
There’s better awareness about composting these days and I see a lot of free workshops happening around. I now have my own minuscule kitchen garden, and hopefully will feed them nutrients from my own compost bin, breaking down all the kitchen waste from my home. It’s a nice cycle and already the garbage generated at my home has gone down to a minimum. Happy that I’m doing my bit, and hope this post will help somebody else to do too.