Recycling
Indian wedding and food waste.
On May 17th, we met Siddhant Agrawal, director of GreenTech Infra Pvt. Ltd.
GreenTech Infra is a social enterprise based in Jaipur, part of the Centre for Development Communication Group. As early as 1994, its founder, Dr. Vivek Agrawal was preoccupied by waste management, and started a door to door collection model. In 2006, GreenTech Infra pdv Ltd was created and focused on sewage maintenance. Treatment of this waste water enhances the crop yield because of added nitrogen and other components of treated sewage water, for farmers.
Jaipur is a popular town for weddings, which is a huge source of waste. In 2012 emerged the idea of offering zero waste solutions for wedding gardens. Wedding gardens produce large amounts of organic waste :
The charity program Annakshetra Foundation consist in rescuing food from parties, weddings, etc., by redistributing the surplus of food to people in need. Two regular associates and a few local NGOs collect the less quantity food and three vans of Greentech work 24/7 to bring the more food, to one of the company’s 3 collection points. Then, it is redistributed by Greentech. Aware of the energy cost of this logistic, GreenTech vans only collect food if the amount given by one donator covers 50 meals. In average 2500 meals are rescued per day. 80% are distributed and the 20% of lowest quality are given to pig farms.
The company is also currently running solidarity fridges in resident colonies and schools. However they face the problem that people are donating food and not surplus of fresh food, which was the purpose. Greentech infra is also involved in projects of textile rental for students mainly.
All the project run by the company are under governmental policies. Greentech Infra investigates the project’s feasibility internally, willing to emphase the cultural and social aspects in their researches. “We target quality instead of cost-efficiency” Saddhant says. To maintain service quality, around 50 engineers are involved into these projects. Inspiring options for our careers !