What stinks the most?
Every time we cross a river bridge in any city or a densely populated locality, we get a stinking smell. We all know for sure that it is the smell from the garbage dumped or thrown carelessly into the water. I know of a man who was an employee in a private limited company. This man had a neighbour who usually dumped garbage in front of his house. He had many futile quarrels with the neighbour.

Once as he was flipping through a magazine, he came across an article about a homemaker in Bangalore who composts organic waste into garden manure. Based on the description of the process given in the article, he bought some big sized earthen pots. He spread an old sheet of paper at the inside of each of these pots and started depositing kitchen waste and other organic waste in his house. He used to separate the other waste and sell them to a waste paper mart. Once a pot was filled with organic waste, he added ‘fast compost’ powder to speed up the process and stirred the content in the pot with an iron rod. He also sprayed Lemon spray to keep the pot away from flies. In a period of 40 days, the entire contents of the pot got composted into manure. He then sieved the contents and packed them in plastic bags. He used some of them for his garden. What a surprise! All the plants grew well and the vegetables and flowers were of better quality than those available in the market.
In the meanwhile, he had started composting organic waste in the other pots. Soon he had friends and neighbours asking for his manure. The organic waste got out of his house was not enough to meet the increasing demand. So he started depositing the organic waste thrown by his troublesome neighbour and composting them along with his. He also realized the need for increasing the speed of the process. So he retained a small portion of the manure in the pot, before putting fresh waste into it. This made the process to be completed in 30 to 35 days. The manure was sold to his friends and neighbours at a nominal rate.
He then needed more organic waste. So he arranged it with a rag picker. The rag picker had to collect organic waste on a daily basis in a separate container and deliver it to him. The rag picker was free to sell the other kinds of waste to make extra money. The rag picker was earning both by collecting organic waste and selling the other wastes. This organic waste too was composted for manure. This was again sold to people seeking good garden manure. The cash flow by selling garden manure after all expenses was decent enough. As the demand for his manure grew, so did the size of the pots. The pots had to be specially ordered from Chitthoor.
He was able to consume almost all the organic wastes in his locality and the rag picker was making a good earning. He also expanded his network by appointing few more rag pickers to cover some more areas. He also looked for other constructive ways of utilizing the organic waste. When people ask him ‘doesn’t the garbage stink?’, he replies them quoting the one liner advertised once by the BrihanMumbai Mahanagara Palika (BMC), “More than the garbage, it is the attitude of people towards garbage that stinks”.





