“You throw your boxes away, just like that?” my friend Latha looked daggers at me and I had no clue why. “Huh?” I asked. She pointed accusingly to the cornflakes carton poking out of my dustbin. She snatched it out, opened the flaps, flattened the box and handed it back to me. “Huh?” I spluttered again.
And so began my journey of segregation and composting.
Getting started
I resisted at first. It was easy for Latha to say — all she has to do is take her peels and toss it into her vast garden. I can’t be digging pits in my small apartment. But she was not giving up, saying space has nothing to do with it. I struggled. Earlier I had a rhythm going: wash, peel, chuck... Now, there was a discordant extra step or two. It became wash, peel, keep the peels carefully to one side and then bin them.
The plastics and boxes needed separate tender loving care. I rinsed them, drained them, dried them and then placed them in a dustbin. A separate one.
There were days when I was good and I remembered to put the wet waste into the big green bucket with a lid and then days when I did not bother. Till a couple of interventions took place. One was a show I caught on TV accidentally. It was about the amount of trash in the mega cities of the world that I couldn’t get out of my head. And the other was when I saw two young men sitting surrounded by garbage, cheerfully segregating waste generated by households inside a gated community. They were on a mission to educate people to give a thought to the way they were disposing their waste. One of them opened a small plastic bag with sambar in it and I recoiled. How many times have I thrown out the accompaniments still in their plastic sachets when I got takeaways! “Ma’am, even if people empty out the packets of food they have not eaten and rinse the plastic once before throwing it in the garbage, we will be grateful,” one of them said. I had never really given a thought to the people who had to deal with my mess. Serendipitously, a green friend gifted me a beautiful terracotta contraption for composting — three pots one on top of another with a lid. Latha gifted me a big bag of soil (to stop me whining about not having any to layer the wet waste).
Going green
I allowed the waste in my green bucket to slowly decompose. I didn’t look at it for several months. I only sniffed suspiciously for any hint of rotting smell. One whiff and I was going to ditch the entire project. But to my amazement, there was none. The amount of waste leaving my home became minimal. Almost nil.
The plastics went to the kabari wala , and when I peeked inside the bucket, I found rich, fertile-looking soil. This went into my flower pots and, I swear, my plants danced with delight. Oh yes, the rotten tomato I had tossed into the composter on one of my bad days had decomposed right there and fresh green shoots had sprung.
In the last year, I have harvested nearly 20 tomatoes. And when I cut them up to make a salad, I pluck basil from another flower pot next to it, and green chillies too.
All grown with the veggie peels I had been persuaded to collect and not throw away.
