Take 100 Waste Pickers in India Out of Poverty

Dear All,

Greetings from New Delhi, where the weather report is ‘blowing dust’ and 111 degrees Fahrenheit. The fact that the Thar desert is encroaching on us from the east serves as a daily reminder of what climate change is slowly doing to many areas bordering deserts around the world.

We are continuing to combat this warming by taking the waste inside cities to create compost, an all-natural soil conditioner. This soil conditioner is needed particularly urgently in central India, where farmland has been leeched of nutrients from decades of exclusive use of chemical fertilizer. Most recently, we’ve been working with our partners, Indian Grameen Services in the city of Indore, to improve compost quality and accelerate the production cycle from over 90 days to just 40 days. This accelerated production more than doubles our compost capacity, and is done using all natural processes of optimizing aeration and moisture levels. We are also expanding into another few housing associations, which will increase the amount of organic waste supply. What’s very encouraging is that we have not yet been able to meet the demand for compost around Indore.

This has been some exciting progress, as we work to improve incomes of the waste pickers that collect and transport the organic waste to the composting centers. Further, in the three months that follow, we aim to catalyze a completely new integrated solid waste management service in a nearby town. This town’s existing waste management system consists of households throwing waste into the street, where it is sporadically swept up and dumped in the nearest lake on the outskirts of town. The environmental impacts of this practice have been serious, and we are all-hands-on-deck to launch our model there by September.

Thank you for your continued support! As a reminder, you don’t have to wait three months to hear updates from us – feel free to send us an email anytime, and also follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Warm regards to you all,

Tiffany and the Waste Ventures team

***Extra Special Thank You***

For all who helped us out on the SlideRocket competition in March – you rock! Thanks to you, we were selected for first place, a prize of $10,000 and a generous match for an additional $10,000 by an anonymous donor. We are privileged to have you as friends. Please give yourself a hug because we can't.