Our next idea is in the Waste Management space. And it’s about time!
It all started off as a shocking realisation that the city we are from (Chennai, India) generates 1.8M tons of waste every year.
That is 4,842 tons of waste per day! And the more shocking part is that 91% of the collected waste is dumped in open landfills!
Waste consists of Organics, Recyclables and Discards.
Waste collected from households (68%), institutions (14%) and commercial establishments (16%) goes from the curb side collection to the transfer stations and ultimately to the landfills. Our current waste management economics are not dependent on segregation but rather a truck tipping model because of which segregation is not enforced at the waste generator level.
Let’s take just recyclables into consideration at the moment
90% of the recyclables are generated from households and shops. While this is a huge number in terms of total contribution, if we isolate each household or a shop, they generate very small amount of waste. So processors who work on these recyclables rely on medium or bulk aggregators to integrate it into their value chain and meet their demands.
If we look at this problem at an Urban India level, the results are even more astonishing.
This problem statement gave birth to Kabadiwalla Connect, where our mission is to work with an existing & robust informal ecosystem of Kabadiwallas (waste pickers/local scrap dealers), technology and design thinking to send less waste to India’s landfills.
Keeping Chennai as the base to research and roll out our idea, we started to understanding the kabadiwalla ecosystem with a lot more depth. After winning a competitive grant of approximately USD 50,000 from the World Economic Forum to take this research further, we started mapping kabadiwallas, analysing their basic demographic profile, the recyclable materials that they handled, as well as the price variations as they sold it up the value chain.
Only to realise how kabadiwallas are one of the best source-segregators of waste.
So we started off by mapping kabadiwallas in Chennai. Early days took us 2 months to map 200 kabadiwallas. But with robust and insightful surveys along with data collection & upload techniques using android devices, the team can today map 200 kabadiwallas in a week.
So far we have mapped 800 kabadiwallas across 3 major zones in Chennai and the learnings just blew our minds. The numbers on the left below are the quantities these kabadiwallas handle.
I have to re-iterate the fact that these kabadiwallas are the greatest invisible source segregators. We call them the invisible recyclers.
That said, they suffer from poor visibility, sub optimal selling prices and inefficient logistics.
Kabadiwalla Connect’s aim is not to disrupt this existing ecosystem but to work with them so that we can transition them from invisible to invincible recyclers.
Now that we have this goldmine of information, most of our time today goes towards educating communities about waste management, segregation and the benefits of recycling.
In the background we are building efficient workflows along with the kabadiwallas, consumer apps to educate the need for segregation and recycling, working on optimising the logistics systems and tie-ups with processors of these recyclables so that it is a win-win situation for all. Better lifestyles for kabadiwallas, reduced demand-supply issues for large volume processors and most importantly lesser tons of waste to the diminishing lands that we live in.
You can read more about us here
Check out the team behind Kabadiwalla Connect and for more updates you can follow our twitter handle @kabadiconnect. If you are in Chennai, India — drop in to say hi :)
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We can also connect on Twitter @sonaal
