CTC - Ainthinai Home Composting Success stories - Part IV

My home My Waste - Sri

Details :

Srimathi Kumaraswamy

5/23/2016

Small 3T Khamba

‪#‎blackgold ‪#‎homecomposting ‪#‎chennaitrekkingclub ‪#‎ainthinai ‪#‎reduce ‪#‎recycle ‪#‎garbageoverlod

My first black gold is ready feeling excited to share with you all..

Just 10 days of my home kitchen waste now changed to earth (yes it smells like Mannvasam) smell of earth...
Using kamba i started home composting 2 months back.. Got first output..
Just want to add kitchen waste in a pot like container (kamba) with little cocopeat everytime.. And spray little water.. Cover it with newspaper and lid.. Just 2 to 3 miinutes daily is enough... Theree pots in kamba.. After the pot is filled have to leave out for 1.5 months then pure soil is ready... Can be used to own plants .. I got 5 kg from my 10 days kitchen waste.. Can be sold too..

Can be used in organic farms as manure...
Thank you Ashwin Sekar for the procedures and delivering kamba to my home.. Thank you Rocky Ravikumar Swaminathan for all valuable inputs...
If anyone interested to start this kindly ping me...

I am not sending daily waste out of my home.. Plastics also collected seperately including chocla covers milk packets... And given to laying roads or plastic collectors...

The joy of doing the right thing - Bharathi Vinoth

Details :

Bharathi Priya

6/12/2016

Small 3T Khamba

Until few months ago, I was one of the city people who used to live in an illusion that I do my duty correctly by putting all my garbage in one black polythene bag, tie it properly and judiciously dump it into a “dustbin” in the street and walk away. I assumed that my job ends there and from there on it’s the responsibility of the municipal workers to dispose them of properly without causing much damage to the eco-system. I never thought about what really happens thereafter and many of us still don’t.

Fortunately I came across Chennai Trekking Club and its inspiring CTC-Ainthinai volunteers. It's through them, I learnt that if we treat our garbage effectively at home by making small lifestyle changes, we can really avoid/reduce polluting our ecosystem.

In the illusion of comfort and modern lifestyle, we often ignore the damage we are doing to this system by just dumping our garbage(wrapping it around in an additional black plastic bag as if we don’t already generate enough garbage ) in a once beautiful marshland like Pallikaranai. Yes!! WE are the ones who are responsible for that big pile of garbage dump we witness in the Pallavaram-Thuraipakkam highway. Slowly and steadily we are contributing regularly for the increase in size of this dumpyard. We as a society can really change this by making some small changes in our lifestyle.

I wanted to change and so here I am after about 4 months of making small lifestyle changes in my home and spending about 2-5 minutes of my daily morning time towards “Segregation and Home-composting”. Now only the floor dust and non-recyclables go out as trash from my home, which comes up to a bin full for every 10 days. Rewind three months and the same bin used to be filled over every other day.

So Composting, how its done ???

During my childhood days, I happen to live in a small town. I vaguely remember my mom throwing away the daily vegetable and other kitchen waste nearby the plants around our home. A much refined process of letting the household organic waste decompose naturally into the ground is otherwise called as Composting. In our city lifestyle where we live in multi-storeyed apartments its impossible to have such a place around our home.

Here comes Khamba pots to the rescue. Khamba pots are nothing but clay pots which are available through vendors such as dailydump. Together with this pot and a sack of cocopeat powder, I was able to witness firsthand the beautiful and effective process of how my household organic waste turned into a useful load of manure.

Segregate the organic waste from other non-decomposable items. Organic waste typically includes fruit & veggie peels, egg shells, food leftovers (only if they are already rotten else they can be used to befriend your street dogs). Once they are segregated, put them in this khamba pot. Add a handful of cocopeat powder. Mix them well and leave it to nature to do the remaining job. One need to add this mix of organic waste and cocopeat daily until the pot gets about 80% full. And once its about 80% full exchange the upper pot with the middle/bottom pot and repeat the process.

When you are busy filling the second/third pot the waste that you have filled in the first pot would have now turned into fresh nutrient rich manure (black gold). I experienced firsthand that composting at home is easy, mess-free, smell-free (except for the nice fresh earth smell – “Mann vaasanai”) and above all very satisfying. All it took was 1.5 sqft area in our balcony and 2 min of time every day.

When I harvested my first batch of black gold yesterday, all I felt was pure bliss and a sense of contentment. This manure can be used for our own plants at home (if you happen to grow) or the plants/trees in your neighboring area or you can hand it over to our CTC-Ainthinai volunteers, they will put it to use in one of the tree plantation events.

Remember that, throwing our unsegregated daily household waste into the street garbage bins is almost same as throwing them on the streets. Especially, with the current disposal system in place this garbage will either end up in Pallikaranai or Kodungaiyur dumpyardand get burnt occasionally, polluting the eco-system which we happen to share with million other living species.

I have begun my path towards the change I want to see. You too can !!!

"Let us take our daily organic waste and put it back to earth, rightfully where it belongs"

"KEEP CALM AND COMPOST ON"