What does it take for a city to clean up its filth? There is just one answer – getting rid of public dustbins. With this in mind, city-based environmental organisation Green Face has launched a first-of-its-kind initiative of home composting through terracotta pots. Now, household kitchen organic wastes can be turned into manure through some simple methods. Organic waste includes waste from the kitchen, leftover food, leaves and flowers. Composting is the process of breaking down organic matter into nutrient-rich humus.
As part of the initiative, Green Face has procured 100 specially designed terracotta composting pots in the first phase from Hyderabad-based environmental organisation Sun Green. “This is an ancient method of composting and hardly takes five minutes time to set this up. Once the organic wastes are kept in the pot, the entire process takes about four to six weeks for the manure to be formed, which can be used for your home plants and terrace gardens. You don’t need a lot of space or time to compost. It takes five minutes a day. And it is a great feeling to make a contribution to healthy plants and to keeping resources out of landfills,” said P. Ratna Latha of Green Face, who started this project in the city along with P. Sravya and P. Siddharth.
The pots come in three varieties — the traditional ‘khamba’ style which can be used for a single household, the ‘leave it’ pot which are of bigger sizes meant for a group of families or residential complex and the flower pots that can be used to decompose only flower wastes. The pots are made by a trained team of 10 potters in Hyderabad. The initial interest for home composting has been encouraging. “Apart from residents of apartment complexes, we have received queries from gated communities in the city as well and corporates have evinced interest for large scale composting units,” said Aruna Shekhar of Hyderabad-based Sun Green organisation, who has been spearheading the “zero waste lifestyle” campaign through solid waste management in Hyderabad since 2007.
The concept of home composting has picked up in Vijayawada and Guntur region as well where they have supplied close to 200 terracotta composting pots in the past four months.
“The demand from Vijayawada for home composting has been enormous. In fact, our next batch of 100 pots will be delivered shortly,” added Aruna.
