Every Home can have a Compost “Basket”, if not a compost bin!

Zero Waste Composting

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Mrs. Lalitha Venkatachalam in Thane, Mumbai, India follows the zero waste model of waste management by producing organic compost at home – in a basket!

When i visited Lalitha ji’s home this year, i discovered that the zero waste composting process is really simple compared to using a large bin. If every home could adopt this model, we could do our bit in solving the problem of 62 million tonnes of waste generated in India annually. We can also

Zero Waste Composting: A quick snapshot

Major features of the simple composting process:

• Compost is made from household organic/vegetable waste
• Does not require construction of bins or worms for composting
• High yield organic manure is made easily at home
• Vegetables peels and leftover tea, coffee are utilized
• Basket with net is placed in a semi-moist area with ventilation and particl sublight to allow for composting

How plastic waste is minimized at home

• Plastic components are avoided or stored for future use – bottles, strings, boxes
• The family buys sweets from shops in their own utensils to avoid using plastic containers or excessive packaging
• Vegetables are bought in cloth bags

Finally, what is disposed?

• Hazardous waste like biomedical and sanitary wastes
• packed and sealed in a red/black color coded bag
• Recyclable or unrecyclable plastic containers: kept to the bare minimum usage

With these ideas and simple day-to-day practices, Mrs. Lalitha helped her entire apartment in managing waste.

I will share more details in this blog post through videos and pictures

Zero Waste Composting: Segregating Vegetable Matter

For starters, here is a video of the step 1 of the process, which is shredding and storing of vegetable peels till they are nearly dry.

Surprising fact: There was no foul odour. Just the organic aroma of soil

More details will be added soon, so follow this post for updates!