Click here to join Express Pune WhatsApp channel and get a curated list of our stories
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
In the morning, a team of workers moves on motorcycles from one housing society to another across Pune to deal with the garbage generated in the apartments. The housekeeping staff of the apartments would have left the mostly-sorted waste in buckets that the team will sort one last time before depositing it into composting bins designed in a sustainable way. Their work spans 100 building complexes and they help process around 10 tonnes of waste every day.
The team belongs to a bootstrapped city startup, ProEarth Ecosystems, which provides solid waste management solutions with the aim of creating zero-waste cities. ProEarth has projects on composting, dry-waste management, garden-waste management, and e-waste management, and holds frequent awareness-building workshops on preventing sanitary waste. In November, ProEarth Ecosystems was selected as one of the 18 finalists—from entries from 20 states—at the National Conference on Social Innovation at the Pune International Centre.
“So far, we have not taken any funding from anybody. We have made our money and ploughed it into building the company further. Now that we want to quickly scale into different cities and provide the same service, we will have to look at raising money,” says Anil Gokarn, who founded ProEarth in September 2014.
The turnover in the last FY was Rs 85 lakh, and the company is on course to earn Rs 1 crore by April 2023.
According to a 2021 report, “Waste-Wise Cities”, by NITI Ayog and the Centre for Science and Environment, the country produces 1,30,000 to 1,50,000 metric tonne (MT) of municipal solid waste daily, which amounts to around 330-550 gm per urban inhabitant per day. “This adds up to roughly 50 million MT per year; at current rates, this will jump to some 125 million MT a year by 2031. What is also of concern is that not only is the quantity increasing, but the composition of waste is changing – from a high percentage of biodegradable waste to non-biodegradable waste,” says the report.
The Swachh Bharat campaign by the government has helped draw the attention of government institutions and private companies towards solving the problem.
ProEarth, for instance, is part of a system or network that includes other environment-conscious stakeholders and is based on cooperation. For instance, when the municipal corporations of Pune do not pick up garden waste from private properties, ProEarth created a process to remove the waste and supply these to NGOs working to green the hills of the city. “In this way, we are handling about 40 tonne of waste. These leaves and mulching materials naturally decompose on the hill and convert into soil. We charge the waste generator but not the NGO to whom we provide this as fertiliser,” says Gokarn.
Another collaboration is with the Institute of Natural Organic Agriculture, whose research and methodologies Gokarn has studied. “For composting, we use their cultures, which have been approved by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. The composting is clean and odour- and pest-free,” he says. “The composting pits are also aesthetically designed and, in some building complexes, have been placed at the entrance rather than in a dark corner,” he adds.
The major hurdle for cleanliness entrepreneurs is a lack of awareness. “For the past eight years, we have been working with customers by handholding them at every step. We also conduct collection drives for societies and organisations, where we begin conversations about conscious living. That drives action towards communities taking an onus on managing the waste they generate. We want to build a zero waste concept where, literally, minimum waste will be dumped in cities and villages,” he says.
