Friday 4 December 2015

KITCHEN KOMPOST: A beautiful solution for the wet garbage problem

Indian houses are super clean. We make sure we throw our garbage out, every single day. Sometimes twice a day. And then we don't care about it. It's garbage, who cares about garbage right?

But is it garbage?

It isn't.

But lets just for a minute assume that it is. Out of sight, out of mind. That's the  code we operate by. 

Here's what happens to it once it leaves the house :

1. Another human being has to handle it, often without any protective gear. Which means they have to stand beside/in it, and sometimes use their hands. 
2. It adds to the scenery of our locality, inviting stray dogs, rats, cows(if you live in Indore). 
3. It is transported to a landfill outside of town, and forms a heap there. The stench becomes a way of life for the people living in the area, and their groundwater will be forever unclean. It occupies land     that otherwise could have provided food for your children and grandchildren. 

Lets just pause and think here. What if there was a way to avoid this, or at least cut it down by half. Would you do it?  For the human being who handles our trash? For the people who live beside it? or For your children, and their children?

One lesson I learned when I moved to a new city in my first job was that I should take responsibility for my own actions. So why not apply that philosophy to my own garbage? Is garbage not a result of my action, and therefore my responsibility?

What I'm about to describe in this post today is a way to handle one half of our garbage issue. 

Garbage can mainly be divided into two parts : Wet and Dry. We all learn in school that wet waste can be converted into compost. If that is true, wet garbage is not garbage at all!

It's food for the soil! We just need to pack it the right way.

What if we had a solution to convert our wet garbage into compost, the soil's favourite food, inside our kitchens, easily, with no foul odour?

Thats exactly what microbiologist Mr. Jayant Joshi, a resident of Thane , Mumbai, has given us. After years of research and trial and error, he has developed a simple yet elegant solution to this complex problem. And his product comes in the form of a simple picnic basket. 

Inventor Mr Jayant Joshi posing with the Kitchen Kompost basket.



The Kitchen Kompost basket, as he has named it, is a mixture of some serious science and lots of common sense. With its custom made mixture of micro-organisms that specialise in the composting of organic matter, and its sensible design, it is an amazing innovation. With a fairly simple day to day care routine, your garbage can become food for your garden! If you don't have a garden, just chuck the compost in the nearest tree, or gift it to friends and family who have a green thumb. The important thing is, your daily wet garbage is off the streets! That's more than enough reason to own one.

Some of you would be wondering why I'm advertising this product on my personal blog. Its because I LOVE IT!  I have been using one myself for about four months now and am thrilled with the results. Even my family couldn't believe their eyes when I showed them the first harvest of compost. "This was our food waste?" they asked me! I even started my own little home garden, just so I had a place to put the compost from the basket!

My fisrt harvest of compost from my Kitchen Kompost basket.
The waste leaving our house has reduced dramatically. Whereas before, the unsegregated waste would lie in the corridor the whole night, waiting for the garbage lady every morning. It would sometimes smell, especially when the garbage lady took a day off, and attract flies, and often soil the dustbin.  If the local stray dog visited at night, we would find the garbage strewn across the floor outside our front door in the  morning. Now, the garbage lady has to ring the bell, asking us for the day's trash, only to be told that our dustbin is hardly full yet! Less headache for us, less work for her. Win-win.

My experience has prompted me to recommend this to everyone, and that's what I'm doing here. I've even started distributing them in Indore, and I hope it will catch on here like it has in Maharashtra.

Mr Joshi is ever enthusiastic in his efforts to get this product to the people. He explained his vision to me once, saying, '' Fifty years ago every house didn't have its own toilet. Now they do. I want every house to have its own compost basket in the next fifty years.''

For years we have taken from the soil unflinchingly, without ever the thought of giving back. For those who thought about it, the ways to do so were too expensive and arduous. That time is gone. Now we can feed the soil of our cities and country again, like it has unselfishly fed us for years. Now we can make sure that our soil will have something left by the time we have children and grandchildren. Now we can help secure their future.

If you're interested in the Kitchen Kompost basket, give Mr. Joshi a call on +919969634182. Or if you want to know more about it, like https://www.facebook.com/KITCHENKOMPOST/