What do you do with the vegetable peels, eggshells, tea leaves and leftover food from your kitchen? Dump them in the bin and forget about it? What if you could use all of that to make compost at home? Before you protest about living in an apartment with limited space, time constraints and the entire process of compost making being messy, direct it to Daily Dump.
Established by National Institute of Design (N.
I.
D) trained industrial designer and design teacher, Poonam Bir Kasturi, Daily Dump shows the way to go green the easy, by offering ways to manage your household waste.
They have a range of home composting units in terracotta that come in different sizes and not only look good but work equally well too.
The end result is good quality manure for your plants, vouched by the green lawns in Poonam's garden! Born out of an enquiry on how to manage household waste, this is an ongoing project with plans to develop a mechanized composter for homes and getting city builders interested in placing composting units with each flat.
Incidentally, she was nominated for the INDEX Award for this project, a prestigious international design award.
Wondering why on earth should you compost when the municipal van comes and takes away your daily garbage anyway? Well, nobody's forcing you to.
But look at it as your tiny input towards going green.
You are reducing some amount of garbage, however small, that ends up in a landfill all mixed up, no matter however much you separate it at home.
Poonam guides us on how to go about it...
Start by segregating your garbage.
The composting units can take all your kitchen waste and even the waste generated by dusting and sweeping but not soap, plastic or metal.
The units are usually two or three tiered and require you to put in an equal mix of wet garbage and dry leaves.
No dry leaves to be found? Put in shredded newspaper instead.
Give it all a stir once in a while.
It's a bit like cooking actually, says Poonam.
Once the contents of the first pot start piling up, bring the second pot to the top.
By the time you pile this one up the contents of the original pot (now at the second rung) would have shrunk and you can shift it to the bottom, bringing the bottom one up and starting the cycle again.
Once your manure is ready it will look like dried tea leaves and smell of rich earth.
Sieve and use.
The composting process does have its share of cringe-inducing moments.
Maggots form inside the pot at one stage but they aid the process and can't get out of the pot so you needn't worry.
You also get a fair share of fruit flies at times but once again, these are harmless.
As for rats, the pots are designed to be rodent free.
To stop it from smelling much, you can pick up lemongrass spray from Daily Dump.
Traveling? Let the pots be.
No fresh waste means no need to stir.
The pots are best kept in your yard if you have one or in a spare balcony of your apartment.
Have a tiny flat? Get the gamlas that hardly take up space.
The best part is that the pots look very pretty and decorative and nobody can really guess what's going on inside! Other ways of going green at home...
Do not throw toxic electronic waste like batteries, CDs, tapes, tube lights, etc in the garbage bin.
Several malls and outlets in Bangalore have special bins for the disposal of e-waste.
Pile it all up and dump it there.
Medical waste (pills, syrups) is poisonous.
As there are no easily available disposal bins, the current best way to get rid of it is to approach a hospital nearby.
Segregate paper and plastic when you dump waste.