Best out of waste
How often do we realise that the food packaging material or wrappers that we are eating from and throwing away without proper disposal may affect the agricultural activities that provide us with fresh food items? This is when the importance of waste segregation comes into the picture. After finishing their masters in Green Technology four years ago, a group of four friends took it upon themselves to revolutionise the way households are generating and handling waste. Forming Sanjeevani S3, an organisation working towards waste management. So far they have inspired 123 societies and 291 restaurants in Mumbai to join them in waste management.
“When throwing away waste, we don’t realise that the dry or electronic waste that we mix up with the wet waste, may later affect the compost that is formed from the recycling of wet waste. As such the farmers get poor quality of manure, harming their crops,” says Zulkif Shaikh, co-founder of Sanjeevani S3.
Not just for the farmers, the entrepreneur tells that the lack of waste management poses risk to the human and the environment too, as a major portion of solid waste, including plastic, medical and electronic waste lie on the landfill sites for decades.
“During our post graduation, we realised that a large section of society is not even aware of waste segregation. That’s when we decided to take up the issue. We start with educating school children and societies about different types of wastes. We explain to them the meaning of dry, wet, biomedical and electronic waste in simpler language or in poetic ways for children so they imbibe it well,” he explains.
The group has been educating school students about composting and waste recycling and has covered around 203 schools. Working in Western suburbs, the group also provides services to collect waste from societies and restaurants across Kandivali, Dahisar, Malad, Borivali and Goregaon. The group has installed composting machines in Malad, where the wet waste is processed and later provided to nurseries and societies. The environment enthusiast further informs that every day 3.5 tonnes of dry waste and eight tonnes of wet waste is collected by Sanjeevani S3. Under their programme In Your Backyard, the group has been assisting around 80 societies in western suburbs to process the waste in their premises.
“It has to be embedded in people’s mind that it is not just the responsibility of civic bodies to treat or manage our waste, but it is our waste. Not just waste management, we have to look after waste generation too and try to minimise it as much as possible,” he concludes.
We start with educating school children and societies about the different types of wastes. — zulkif shaikh