SHILLONG: Time was when people had to think and make space for their kitchen waste. That was a time when except for bottles and tins most other waste was biodegradable. Then came the plastic bag and life has never been the same. The plastic bag provided a perfect alibi to collect household garbage in it and then fling it anywhere, including public drains, water bodies, forests and just about everywhere.
Then came the garbage collection system and people stopped thinking about reducing waste. After all they didn’t need to worry about how much waste they generated; what kind of waste and where it was dumped. This perhaps is the evil that threatens humans today.
The entire Greater Shillong has only one dumping ground at Marten. That landfill cum composting centre plus resource recovery centre (the nomenclatures don’t make it easier on the landfill). This place has reached its capacity to retain garbage despite the retaining wall on the road to Umiam.
Last summer that wall collapsed leading to the plastic tsunami at the Umiam reservoir.
Since then the government was supposed to have reconstructed the wall but the problem resurfaces especially because of the unprecedented heavy rains and Shillong being a hill station.
Everything flows down the slope to land up at a river or stream or a lake.
To combat this devastating impact on nature, Bethany Society which does multifarious activities using their disabled inmates including the blind and deaf, on Saturday demonstrated to members of the Operation Clean-Up (OCU) team which has been cleaning Shillong since August last year, on how to reduce waste and turn it to compost instead. This programme was conducted at the Bethany Society premises.
Bethany Society Director, Carmo Noronha, while addressing the OCU team said, “Nature does not need humans, its humans that need nature so we owe it to ourselves to reduce the amount of waste that lands up at landfills by treating waste at individual homes or within the respective Shnongs under each Dorbar Shnong.”
Noronha said that when people clear the weeds in their gardens or mow their lawns, especially big spaces like Golf Links etc they usually dispose of that “waste” and had them over to garbage trucks which take the waste to Marten.
Bethany Society has come up with a model of putting all the green biomass in a pile and allowing it to go through a process of self destruction. The trainees were asked to put their hand inside the pile of biomass and to feel the heat generated by the dead leaves, grass and what have you.
This pile is then mixed with brown matter which could be soil or leaves that has already dried up.
To this mixture is added wet cow dung and ground rice husk to speed up the composting process. After this a square tower is built up by using bamboos cut into half and then piled one on top of another until the tower reaches about four feet high. The mixture is then put inside this tower and allowed to remain there about a month to turn into the best organic garden and farm fertiliser.
This circular economy is what Bethany Society has been promoting and training people across the state for. The Society does not need to talk much because it demonstrates what it preaches. All around the Bethany Society premises grow pumpkins, squash, cauliflower, cabbages, radish and even micro-greens.
Bethany Society also produces bamboo vinegar to deal with worms and insects that wreak havoc on plants and leaves. This left the OCU trainees wondering what it is that Bethany Society does not do.
The best part is that Bethany Society is ready to provide training to all who are willing and ready to reduce the harm done to nature by treating everything as garbage and without taking responsibility for what happens to the garbage thereafter and the harm it causes to the environment.
“Unless people stop to think they will not change their behaviour. But people can only stop to think if they visit places like Marten and see what their “garbage” is actually handled and why the place emits the stench it does,” Noronha stated as a final lesson to the trainees.