04-05-2025
A green synergy
In a case of synergy, three entities from three different constituencies of the green economy recently carried out a 'transaction' defined by an abundance of goodwill.
It is an equivalent of what one would call 'entente' in international politics. On the surface, there was commerce, or rather what appeared to be commerce. But the moves were aimed at offering support to the one who needed it, and free of any intentions of profit. Thanks to this, the latest compost to emerge from the lane composters at Kastuba Nagar is growing the greens at a farm in Kottivakkam.
When Residents of Kasturba Nagar Association (ROKA) harvested its fifth cycle of composting, the compost was meant to go into sealed packets that could be purchased. Down the line, ROKA realised it had to sell its compost to cover a part of the costs of running the lane composters.
'From the third cycle onwards, we started selling the compost at Rs. 10 per kg, each pack holding 10 kg of compost,' says Janna Venkitesh of ROKA.
A vast amount of compost from the latest cycle -- the fifth -- skipped the packaging part.
'Forty to fifty kg of compost was given to residents of Kasturba Nagar; they were on a priority list. And close to 200 kg of compost went to Kazhani farms in Kottivakkam on East Coast Road. Ann Anra of India Wasted Trust (Ann) bought the compost and donated it to Kazhani Farms. India Wasted has a dry waste drop-off point at Kazhani Farms,' says Janani. As a sidelight, Janani volunteers the information that she has been buying greens from Kazhani Farms and has found it to be of excellent quality. With the compost from Kasturba Nagar now going to Kottivakkam, that makes it a two-way street.
Ann Anra of India Wasted weighs in:
'At Wasted, we focus more on dry waste sorting and collection and aggregation, whereas organisations like Namma Ooru Foundation and communities like ROKA that do decentralised waste management for expertise in wet waste. We also work with SWMS to give waste to the CNG plant. But why I particularly have always been interested in compost is that it is the perfect solution and Indians are already good at making it. We had taken a training programme for about 250 beneficiaries (from an unskilled labour constituency) to get them to become experts in composting, making bio enzymes and essentially impart to them the ability to work with both wet and dry waste, gain sorting capacity. Getting them started on these processes (composting and bio-enzyme making, sorting waste and reclaiming recyclables), which obviously have a money component attached to them, we were thinking about connecting and buying back the material (compost being one of them). While thinking in these terms, we heard about ROKA's harvest being really good and when I was speaking to Kazhani Farms, they said they needed two to three tonnes of compost a month. So, we footed the bill, buying the 195 kg of compost from ROKA which offered it to us at a discount, for Kazhani Farms. Because Kazhani Frams has been nice enough to offer us a free space in Kottivakkam for our dry waste drop-off point in that region.'
