Oped»
Hold it right there
- (un)common sense
JUN 14 -
When it comes to garbage, the most obvious escapes our attention in Kathmandu. As we indulge in high talk about foreign technology or investment in this sector, we forget that composting at home or the neighbourhood could solve most of the garbage problems and that composting is not that a difficult thing to do. A simple composting bin or pit is the easiest way out of Kathmandu’s garbage mess. Well, that is an understatement for sure.
Let’s consider some of the obvious: Compost is crucial for producing healthy soil that is an absolute precondition for healthy food. Do I need to make further connections between healthy food and a healthy body? It will help keep our city streets clean. It can generate business and employment opportunities. For example, there is a big market for compost bins waiting to be captured. Those who do not have their own plot of land could sell their compost. Many may not know that composting could be great way of teaching school students about problem-solving skills, about soil ecology, about food and health and about the environment. Nowhere is the permaculture adage, “waste is nothing but wrong thing in wrong place” more apt than here.
Before I moved to Nepal, I lived very modestly compared to many of my graduate school compatriots in Toronto. Even then, I checked out a lot of garbage every day. For the first six months of my life as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I lived as a paying guest to a long-time Nepali friend from my college days in Chitwan. He and his family had immigrated to Toronto and had bought a house and they were kind enough to have me as their live-in guest. Garbage disposal was our daily affair. The municipality had garbage collection service once a week and it had provided three containers — a brown one for “garbage”, a green one for compostable materials, and a blue one for recyclable materials. By the day when we had to put our bins on the kerb for the municipal waste service to pick up, the garbage and compost bins used to be full, while the amount of materials in the recyclable bin varied. When we had a party, it was full of beer and wine bottles.
After six months of living as a paying-guest in that suburban house, I moved to downtown Toronto to share an apartment with friends. The apartment towers we lived in had big garbage dumpsters, and I remember depositing garbage-filled bags into them almost every day, together with quite a bit of recyclable paper, bottles and cans. On average, Canadians produce far more waste than Nepalis; and a very small part of that consists of compostable materials. Much of the dangerous waste is regularly exported to poor countries as charity — such as old computers. No wonder, among the 10 big waste dumpsters outside the University of Toronto’s family housing apartment tower, only one was for compostable materials.
Things are vastly different in Kathmandu. Most of us may not know the statistics, but more than two-thirds of what we throw out of our homes, mostly to street side open dumps, along the banks of cesspool-like rivers and into dump sites in the surrounding villages, are fully compostable materials. But anyone who pays attention to their own house will not have a hard time figuring this out.
I moved to Nepal from Toronto to carry out my year-long doctoral research on present practices and future possibilities of ecological agriculture. Two weeks in Kathmandu and I have come to realise how little garbage we produce here; and most of what we dump as garbage are materials that could be converted into beautiful, sweet-smelling compost — leftover food, cotton rags and vegetable peelings. The rest of the garbage consists of things that are easily recyclable, the regular among them being paper, plastic and bottles, with a few items of scrap metal once in a while. This presents immense possibilities for generating compost and addressing perhaps one of the most fundamental problems that Kathmandu has been facing. I must say here: There are already many who have been doing composting. However, a lot of others don’t. It is not uncommon, therefore, to see every street corner used as an open dumpster.
But this seemingly obvious possibility could not be realised in the absence of a few simple things. The first thing I did as soon as I arrived in Kathmandu was to call up a few institutions that I knew were involved in providing various services for composting. I called Kathmandu Metropolitan City’s environment section only to be told that they were fresh out of compost bins and that they had placed a manufacturing order.
“When will I be able to pick one up?” I asked. “You might have to wait for another one and a half months,” someone at the Kathmandu Metropolitan City replied. The tone was polite, but there did not seem to be any earnestness in the voice. Then I called up the Women’s Environment Protection Committee (WEPCO). I got the same answer. How would an innovative business person see this?
Many friends and I at Martin Chautari have shown interest in getting one compost bin each for our homes, in addition to getting a few for composting Martin Chautari’s kitchen waste. The more I thought about this, the more I became aware that there was a good market waiting for innovative businesspersons. Recently, as we were discussing composting in our house, my seven-year-old son told me that their school teaches them how to do it. After a few days of our conversation, I randomly called six schools around Kathmandu to explore what they do with their kitchen waste. Unlike my son’s school, none of them had any composting going on.
Not all composting needs to be done in composting bins, although the two-chamber bins I have seen look the easiest and most efficient way to compost. Think tens of thousands of compost bins that could potentially be sold to thousands of schools, which then use composting as a way of teaching their students about problem solving in Kathmandu. Tens of thousands of households could use one square metre of their available space to place the bin so that instead of packing their kitchen waste in the now infamous black plastic bag and throwing it out the gate, they could process it into compost for their vegetable beds and flower pots. Innovation is not just about doing complex things. It looks like when it comes to Kathmandu’s garbage problem, the best innovation is seeing the most obvious and simplest possibilities right about us.
(I am interested in exploring ecologically saner innovative business ideas although, I must confess, when it comes to money, I don’t have much. Isn’t there money in the mess, though?)
Anil Bhattarai
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-06-15 08:46
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