Turning Garbage into Gold!

Solid and Liquid waste management is a hectic task not just for all Municipalities and Corporations, but also daunting task for all Gram Panchayat. With increasing trend of Use-and-throw materials in Villages, Gram Panchayats are also vulnerable to accumulation of hazardous wastage. Kurudampalayam Gram Panchayat that is close to Coimbatore city in TamilNadu not merely manages solid waste well; rather it recovers usable resources from waste. Therefore, Kurudampalayam Gram Panchayat forbids the usage: ‘solid waste management’, and replaces it with ‘solid resource management’.

“Waste is a misplaced resource and unorganized wealth”

Kurudampalayam Gram Panchayat Consists of 14 wards with 11, 400 households generating waste of not less than 1000 Kg per day before Solid Liquid Resource Management was implemented. When the problem of waste disposal was raised in Gram Sabha meetings, Technical experts of Coimbatore District Rural Development Agency, Indian Green Services and all elected ward members of Panchayat held their hands together to implement Dr. Vellore C. Srinivasan ‘s model of Solid Liquid Resource Management (SLRM). This successful model of zero wastage urged me to bid a visit to Kurudampalayam.

Fresh raw materials will be odorless for 12 hours and takes 72 hours to turn into infested wastage, So the basic approach here is nothing is turned waste, i.e, the workers are provided with Tri-wheeler battery vehicle to collect food, Fruits &vegetable wastage from hotels, households every six hours. Collected green wastage are segregated in temporary storage unit in which 50% can be cattle fed, rest are eaten by ducks and hen that are grown. This temporary storage unit is Solar roofed that meets the need of charging the battery vehicles.

Organic wastes that cannot be eaten by Cattle are fed into Shredder and then they are poured to digester plant, which produces Methane gas from anerobic digestion. While Methane gas is stored and used for community cooking, slurry got from them is dried in Sunlight & used in Vermicast production.

30,000 Earth worms can be produced from 1 ton Vermicast

Revenue is generated for Gram Panchayat by selling the Earthworm, Vermicompost, Vermiwash, Vermigold, Panchagavya prepared from Cow urine. Nearly, 400 kg of blackgold is produced per day and 1 Kg is sold for Rs.400.

Inorganic plastic wastes are segregated into 68 different categories, metals into 8 different categories and bottles into 120 different categories which are sent for recycling. Non-recyclable plastics are shredded and used to lay roads for nearly 1000 Kilometers by patented method of Padma Shri Dr. Rajagopalan Vasudevan.

Kurudampalayam Gram Panchayat works with women Self help groups and appoints physically challenged people in SLRM Project ensuring them a steady income and sustainable living for all.

The success hinges upon establishing at the Gram Panchayat level local management system from logistics to cash inflow to final disposal. It requires massive efforts in aspects like educating the community, training the janitors who go door to door collecting garbage meeting the operational expenses, user fees collection system and so on.

There is no doubt, that the work of Sarpanch and people of Kurudampalaym is meritorious in co-operating to lead by example in turning Garbage into Gold!