 So, good afternoon everyone. My name is Karan and you have Yogita there and me here and we are from Green Essentials. For those of you who joined our webinars last month called Anyone Can Grow, you've already learned a little bit about us. We run a sort of kitchen garden store in Goa and we teach people how to grow their own food. But we are really excited to bring you this session because this store that I'm mentioning which is called Green Essentials actually started because of this lady we have here today speaking to us and I am not trying to flatter her when I say that because our journey into creating Green Essentials started when Yogita and I were gifted I think for our first anniversary one of Poonam's Compostors. So it was a chota kamba at that time and it came to us by road from Bangalore by a friend who picked it up and gifted it to us. And I think Yogita decided that it was just so amazing that she needed to figure out a way to promote it here in Goa and you know Yogita's excitement tends to be infectious and you know she was like yeah yeah I'm just going to start selling these and then what happened was I looked at her and I said but you know we need to have a store or something to sell these. Her idea had been to sell right out of home and I was like yeah yeah no way that's not happening. So anyway we ended up starting Green Essentials and of course composting at home also at the same time and eventually we ended up doing a lot of kitchen gardening too. So we'd like to thank Poonam for that. Poonam other than being this person who's created an amazing tool for those of us as individuals who care about our own waste to actually deal with our own waste is also one of the most amazing human beings that I know. So yes I know I'm sounding like a bit of a fan but it's true and we are super happy to have her here and you know trying our best to embarrass her before she can get started right. So in this session what we suggested to daily dump and to Poonam is that you know composting is something that is really really something that a lot of us have suddenly got interested in since we are stuck home. It may be because we are stuck without compost and lockdown. It may be because suddenly we realize that you know this kitchen waste or household waste is something we want to deal with. So we are going to do two sessions. One session this one is about composting at the household level what you can do as an individual or a family and next Thursday we are planning another session which is about composting at a larger scale if you are a say a workplace with many people there or a housing society which wants to you know cut out how much waste is actually going back into the landfills in the city leading to a cleaner environment. So you know without any further delay I will just request what I'll do is I'll just start with a simple poll which I'd request you to sort of answer before we get started into the session. We will run a few polls you know as time goes along just to get some feedback and understand what your personal challenges are right. So if you can just take this minute to please respond to this before I hand over to Poonam and start the session. So the question is you know what scares you most about trying composting and I think scares is the appropriate word because we've had people come to us with you know a great amount of trepidation in their expressions and voices and like most other things I would say it's easy when you know how but we'd love to get your feedback here too. Other than Poonam we have a couple of our colleagues from Daily Dump here also. One is Vinita who has helped us put together this session and we also have Kiran. So Vinita and Kiran and also Yogita will be putting together your questions please feel free to put in your questions when you want to. If you're watching this session on YouTube then you can comment right there and we'll pick up your questions or respond to them over there. If you happen to be using Zoom I can see there are several of us over here then just go into the Q&A tab that is at the bottom you know it's like two speech bubbles there's the Q&A button right at the bottom of your interface and you can enter your questions in there okay all right okay we are only halfway there I'll give you another 30 seconds please if everyone can just answer the poll okay so I'll end the poll now thank you for taking the trouble to do that and I will now pass on to Poonam. Hi everybody welcome to this wonderful session Karan of course has embarrassed me but I would like to say that it is an honor and pleasure to be part of Yogita and Karan's lives because they've enriched it as much as they say that I have enriched theirs and at a time like COVID and post COVID all of us are suddenly appreciating all the relationships we have and so very grateful Karan and Yogita for being part of your journey and you guys being part of daily dumps journey thank you so much and it's a pleasure having to do this with Hasgeek and my colleagues Vinny and Kiran are there to answer questions and I've already seen a lot of questions pop up in the chat window so we will answer all of them I promise we will answer all of them so let's hang in there I also assume from the tone of the questions that have already appeared that many of you have actually tried composting but there may be so I'm going to ask quickly in the chat how many of you have not done composting at all so I get a sense of how many out there actually this is the first time how many is it the first time or you can raise your hands or just say plus plus at the chat thing so get an idea right so are there many of you the first time okay there is one any more for the first time okay all right so we are getting some oh yes okay so there's a lot of first timers so all the people who've tried it have failed and you have those questions we will come back to you slightly later during this presentation I'll start from the beginning because that's a great place to start so I'm going to quickly share my screen and uh I want to take you through the journey my my background is I was trained as an industrial designer from NID many years ago and I was very interested to see okay can this large messy problem like waste is there something that design can do and that's where I was coming from of course I didn't like the mess I love cleaning so with this this combination I decided okay I've got to you know I've got to figure this out so when I actually got into it and then looked at the waste and traveled and met so many people visited so many landfill sites I put together this very simple extract of our journey we all want a clean city everybody wants it there's nobody I've met who said I want the dirty city I'd want a dirty country but then why is it still dirty so our research actually showed that it's dirty because about 40 years ago whatever we put together and threw it away was mostly natural and biodegradable the minute we started using a lot of plastic that story changed so our habits were the same we were throwing everything out and we thought it would become if there was not a problem but what we didn't realize is that the materials had changed and materials didn't behave the same way they did in the time of our grandparents and so so the the key thing is in today's modern world if we don't separate we will not be clean we put everything in one bag and the other interesting factor is that when we ask people do you know that this is why this is happening let's say yeah but what can I do I mean I have I mean what do you expect me to do what there's I don't know what else to do and the government needs to do something so we said all right actually what you can do is first you should know what the core problem is and the core problem is if you actually look at your dustbin right my dustbin your dustbin we open it out and we weigh everything that is in the bin on a daily basis and you do a math kind of thing over the month you'll find that the average dustbin is 60% organic in weight not in volume but in weight so that means every Indian is throwing out this poison bag every day it's poison because you are taking tomato and your kharadhanya's are things and your onion peels and you're mixing it with plastic or a battery or a sanitary napkin if you mix it it becomes poison but if you keep it separate then you have a chance to recover some of it and you do not have so much poison to transport and what we were doing we were spending taxpayers money to take all these poison bullets take poison transport poison and dump poison so I said god this is ridiculous I mean there must be a better way of doing this and so I never knew anything about composting I remember biology class where we bisected or dissected whatever you call it a cockroach or a butterfly or something like that I don't even remember that was the extent of my knowledge of nature and composting actually got me started and that's why I tell everybody you know and today this world environment day is the team is let nature in right make time for nature especially at the time of COVID we all realizing we we just messed with nature's balance so this is a reminder and composting is a great way to reconnect with nature if you've never connected with nature so what I did was I started learning about composting and I discovered my god the smelly stuff becomes like this rich black material and it's very good food for plants and then I was so excited I asked people I said you know you can do this in the home in your house and everybody said no are you mad why would I keep waste inside my house there's no way it's unhealthy and I get all kinds of bugs and so then I said this has to happen I mean that's when we designed India's first home composter and I had done some work on actually understanding what sustainability was and was teaching at that time design and I said okay I need to make a composter that will fit India and that's why we created our signature terracotta composter and the other waste if you keep this organic waste out of landfill I'll tell you about composting but I'll just want to cover the other parts of the waste that you generate at home the other waste that is like your paper your plastic your you know any metal glass all of that is usually recyclable if you keep it clean and dry and make sure that it reaches the recycling sector and yes India does have a great recycling infrastructure have lots of people doing this lots of jobs are dependent on this and it's very important for us to keep this clean and safe for them because they actually have to put their hands in to separate this so if I put a dirty sanitary napkin inside my newspaper file it's really very difficult when you see people sort it and have to deal with your mess so being mindful about keeping this separate is actually our understanding that there are other people and we need to be a little more careful on what we throw out for them and whether it's a person or it's water or soil everything is important I mean we put all kinds of stuff into our water all kinds of stuff into our soil we don't realize that they're finally going to come back and bite us and the important thing also we are realizing after all these years of work even children don't understand this connection they're able to articulate it as in their words but when you they can't understand and connect with it as a practice in their lives there's a gap over there and that is something that we all have to constantly remind ourselves about so there is this other this hazardous waste which is either your you know your batteries your medicine our paints all your electronic material all of that needs again to be handled very safely sanitary waste now because of covid there is a lot of legislation being put into place because to have a proper medical waste and sanitary waste handling but we had not put in enough infrastructure we had not sent enough money in managing this pipeline till now that is the hard truth that's why it's very important to make all the switches if you're using sanitary napkin please change to either a completely biodegradable napkin or a menstrual cup or a reusable cloth bag if you're using diapers become part of these large groups that are forming all over the urban centers where mothers are supporting other mothers to use cloth diapers instead of these disposable diapers so there are solutions emerging and it's very important that you be part of it because it really matters and you should only give about 10 to the landfill every day so take a minute now and just ask yourself how much of this do i do and how much is how easy is it to do how much can i do easily and in my house i am able to throw waste out at 10 once in 10 days i don't have to throw it out every day because i manage to keep everything separate and of course i compost so for us it's also what we've learned is you can provide the technology but it's very important for us to also change our mindsets if we are putting government and tax money into big waste plants very often we find those waste plants nobody's maintaining properly and then it becomes expensive to run them and it becomes an expensive to cut long distances no the truck drivers don't want to take such long calls to put waste into some village somewhere then the villagers over there get upset and they say why the hell are you dumping your waste in front of us so it has to become decentralized so along with the technology we have to do a lot of work in mindset how many of us actually have inside already i see in the questions people are saying i'm scared of bugs so when i started i will tell you a story there is a black soldier flying magnet that comes in composting and i didn't know anything about composting so one day and it was during the rains i was doing all this experimenting and i had no clue okay and i'm not one of those very scientific kind of people so i don't i don't go deep into research papers i don't know how to read them really well and that's willitas 14 sitting here also she's our go to researcher and so when i was experimenting i didn't know that this black soldier flying magnet can multiply like like like really i mean there'll be like swarming they'll all be shivering there'll be so many that are swarming there so they but they were all over my place they were under my carpet they were inside my printer and at one point my husband said punam what are you doing i mean do you have to do this and it's then i realized you know people are saying they're scared of bugs i said okay now i really need to get to the bottom of this guy and i found which no biology teacher told me and i never knew that this kind of concept existed that there were good flies and there were good maggots and i was like take it over i said wow there is something called good maggots they look so creepy how can they be good and that actually again started me on this journey of understanding why nature is so important and i asked myself i've lived for 44 years without knowing nature i must be the most slow learner in the world and this black soldier flying magnet this suddenly made me understand that these bugs are part of this balance system an ecosystem so if the ecosystem is working well you will not have a problem and the same thing we're learning now with covid the virus is contained in ecosystems you mess with the ecosystem you have a problem so our mindset to this should be am i doing this within the ecosystem then there should not be a problem today's locust problem is also the same thing we've we've messed with some balance whether it's the hydrological cycle balance whether it is the you know the earth's water retention balance so if we start and understand that there's this system and it works in harmony when there's a balance then we will not feel scared of a bug then our mind can tell itself that actually bugs are not a problem have i created the right ecosystem in my house where the composter is working well and all the bugs there are good bugs that are sitting there are doing their job and the problem will never become too big because it's only a home composter the other thing is how often do we think that if we throw something out it's far away we solve the problem all of us think that but actually how do you bring it inside your homes and make it visible and make it challenging so that's what we try to do in our company we try and make it easy we say bugs are there we make it visible we talk about them fully we say see this is the good things this is how you control them this is how if you have a problem we're there to help you so we don't say where there will be no bugs no we don't ever say that we're saying there will be some bugs these are the kinds of bugs and most of them are very good bugs and none of them are harmful and this is how you balance them and then again the other thing is people will say why don't you make this you know this complicated i've seen abroad it's all closed in a box you press a button and it'll become compost in two days that should work but India doesn't work like that our homes are not built like that and even if you had to do that it will cost you some 15,000 rupees to do it and you don't know when it will fail when i have a washing machine that fails right i for for i have to run around and ask this guy to come and service it and service it it's okay for a washing machine because you don't have to wash every day but for waste because you generate it every day even one day you'll get irritated with the smell or you'll get irritated when you have to throw it out and maybe the guy will not come and pick it up in many places in India right now because of covid the waste workers are not coming to pick up your waste so then you realize my god i need to be self-sufficient i need to figure out what i can do to manage by myself and yes lots of people feel that it's not my job the government should do it uh large companies should do it why shouldn't individual but the beauty is it's our waste and sometimes we need to think about how we should handle it partly so in fact when Modi started his uh Swachh Bharat campaign we had sent him this presentation saying that this is the seven point program we think that's important to keep India clean and we still feel that if india's people have to participate in keeping india clean we have everybody to be on the same page and that's what drives our work really they say how can we make it easy for you to understand how can we make it fun for you to understand how can we help you actually become closer to uh making sure that you throw zero waste out of your um out of your homes every day i'm going to stop here for a minute now just to get a sense of um any questions that we can take now before you go we go on to the next session um okay so i'm i'm looking at the questions is the volume okay for everybody so punam i'll just read out some questions for you uh volume is fine there is a question from Manisha Thorat and she says that she had seen a video long ago with a compost pipe in the center of a planter yeah and she's tried doing that but uh i think it was not very successful uh and successful very she says that the nothing seems to grow around is is it that we cannot have composting and growing plants together this is one question yeah so there are in fact you will see uh when you look at the internet right uh you will see many many kinds of solutions right i will run you through some very popular ones the pipe is a very popular one especially in kerala and uh i and i also will tell you something interesting about solutions some solutions will work for you some may not they may work for other people but fundamentally please understand composting is about is a chemical reaction it generates heat okay so when you have something that is generating heat and needs oxygen right so you have to ask yourself if i had a pipe and if i put waste down am i going to have the optimum decomposition happening because all the air is locked in and once you have anaerobic decomposition that means decomposition without oxygen then there is no there is too much of heat generated over there which is not good for any plant growth so you it depends on where you put it how you put it how wide your pipe is so if it didn't work for you it may most probably would have been because the ground below did not have enough sufficient uh uh nutrition plus it had was generating too much heat the composting inside and so no other plant would grow around it the other very uh solution that keeps coming back to us is can i grind all my kitchen waste in my mixie add water into it and directly put the slurry in my plants there are some people who will swear that it works so i my only my thing is whether it works or not it will definitely attract rats so if you're okay with rats then go for it okay uh there's another question punam where emma asks do maggots always come with composting are they supposed to yeah so maggots will most often come with composting there are some customers for some reasons their diets and the temperatures that are generated inside that home composter do not allow the maggots to come with them in the sense the maggots eggs are not formed if you have uh temperature above 65 degrees then maggot eggs don't survive no other eggs also survive so uh it depends on your temperature maggots coming is very good because they're the biggest carnivores as far as food is concerned they will devour all that food and make composting go very fast what they release in terms of their smells there's a certain kind of chemical they release which keeps housefly populations in check so houseflies don't come and lay the eggs black soldier fly maggots are harmless the flies that come out of black soldier fly maggots are called are they they're the soldier flies they have no mouth parts so that they can't carry disease and because they keep away the housefly which is actually the pathogen carrying fly so composting actually then becomes a safe space in fact some scientists apparently have used black soldier fly maggots to control housefly populations in certain areas so yes maggots are very good they are terribly irksome if they come out during the monsoon how to keep maggots inside make sure it's not very wet make sure there's enough food and then they will not come outside in case your maggots are coming outside you can create a moat kind of thing kiran has done that in her house so the maggots go and just drop into the moat and every day you can actually scoop them out and keep them under a tree birds love them a very good chicken feed also very high in nitrogen in fact all over the world the world is moving to creating these maggots in large numbers crushing them as nitrogen and feeding them to chickens right punam we have several more questions but what i'll do is that we line them up for later in the session also if yoghita kiran and vinita can respond to some of those questions one on one while we are getting there right and then we'll retain the best of those questions to share with everybody else also okay so please go ahead yeah so i'm going to quickly cover composting itself how do you compost what is the basics of composting what are you seeing my screen yes absolutely yes okay so this is our site why i'm using the screen i mean why am i using the site right now it's because we designed the site so that you could learn from the site directly and everything is always available for you we also have a very active youtube channel so you can see all the films of our products there but i'll start with basics of composting so if you go to the learn section the basics of composting are here this is your kitchen waste what all can go in your bread your pizza your cheese um leftover food if it's not too runny like means i can't put russum inside i can't put buttermilk inside but i will strain off the extra water and put everything else inside the only thing that cannot go is the hard coconut shell and of course no plastic absolutely no plastic so this kitchen waste looks like this after about 17 18 days you will see the bones are still formed the mango pits are still visible leaves forms will still be visible if you have a very thick part of the banana which is that uh bunch part you'll still see it and this will be after 45 days after you have sieved it you've passed it through a sieve so this is basically the compost journey yeah and the what is what are the aspects of decomposition that you should know a thank god man didn't invent it it's a natural process it's nature's way of recycling all its nutrients uh what starts of is food for something else becomes food for some other creature so the apple that falls from the tree becomes food for all those little insects and microbes and then goes back as food back to the tree it's full of life and uh i never knew that soil had life and good healthy soil is supposed to have life nobody taught me when i was in school they never looked at told me look at soil look at this magic thing called soil i thought soil was i mean it's not useless it was not something you looked at you just stamped on it every day but literally compost makes you understand that soil has life and if it didn't have life life on earth wouldn't exist and it releases leach it and reduces in volume and why how does it happen it just microbes are there all over us and they start acting on uh organic matter which is your apple after it starts growing old in the aging process and then it becomes food for something else because the microbial action happens uh when it has oxygen it has no odor and that's because the chemistry which i'll just show you it generates heat it's an exothermic reaction and it needs the right mix for composting to happen without any any problem and happen effectively you need your kitchen waste which is mainly nitrogen you need to add uh carbon which is your cocopeat powder and i have some here in my hand so this is cocopeat powder it's the uh it is made in many factories along the coast in india and uh you need the moisture that is inherently in kitchen waste and you need the presence of oxygen if you don't have that oxygen then you have a problem with the smell so if it smells then you just have to go and aerate it a bit and add some carbon and your equation will balance out there are many benefits of compost and i'm going to not cover all of them because i'd like to go on to showing you how to compost at home and the methods are people will say what is the difference between vermicompost and your compost vermicompost so we do aerobic decomposition aerobic decomposition is you take your organic material and we have a powder basically it's cocopeat powder you add that daily daily that's very very important to remember you have to put carbon daily and we have enough oxygen in our products because we've designed them like that and the moisture in the organic waste itself gets released and that makes sure that you get carbon dioxide on the other side of the equation and not hydrogen sulfide or ammonia those are the two smelly gases that's right when we say you know everybody says uh waste will smell waste will not smell hydrogen sulfide and ammonia smell so uh remember waste was composting itself does not need to smell anaerobic is when you don't have oxygen in the pile like biogas and vermicomposting is the same thing but you have worms you add worms to it and because you add worms you have to be very careful not to put too much meat not to put too much lemon and not to put things like onion peels because it messes with the acidity of the pile and the heat and worms will die in highly acidic piles or piles that have too much heat so we don't recommend vermicomposting in our products only because we believe that you should not throw anything out even lemons you should be able to compost if you're not already using it for a bio-enzyme or you're not uh you know lots of people actually take lemons dry it out very well in the heat and then grind it and put it into their dishwashing uh uh you know material that they make at home so there are many uses of lemons but lots of people don't have time to do it also so they we'd suggest that they compost it and that's why we don't suggest vermicompost so you should start today and our role in uh if decomposition is in the natural process lots of people say what are you doing I mean why should daily dump exist so our role is to have people understand the process and adopt it in any which way we don't say you have to buy our products not at all you can buy whichever product but you understand that it is easy to do and we're we've made this very easy for you to understand all the visuals in our site and you can see um and learn from it and we are always there at the end of a phone call on whatsapp to give you guidance so I will just show you the what we do in our products so like I said you take your kitchen waste and you add carbon every day right and this particular powder that we've got a special mix of it has the microbes in it it has some compost and it has got cocopeat so you can just add cocopeat and it'll still work for you um the what does the remix powder do it actually does is absorbs the extra moisture it makes composting stir-free if you're using only dried leaves to compost that means you take your kitchen waste and add dry leaves because if you know dry leaves are also carbon but if you add dry leaves they tend to compact and they take a very long time to break down so their absorption power for for water which is released is not as great as the powder so therefore you'll have to stir every day otherwise the oxygen gets compacted over there it doesn't go in and whereas with the remix powder you don't have to stir at all you just keep layering every day kitchen waste powder kitchen waste powder and you get very very rich compost and this powder itself is a great source of carbon which is what you need for the microbial action to happen and the resultant compost because you already put the remix powder it's friable enough in the sense that it's loose enough for you to directly put your seeds into it and the beauty about remix powder is that it helps you get even the first time beginner will get it right we'll get it right the first time whereas in the beginning when we just started nobody wanted to buy this extra remix powder so they used to use leaves and it was such a problem because they'd fail and our remix powder contains some microbial activity now some people have asked already in the questions what can go in what can't go in how can I compost coconut leaves so coconut is an amazing tree actually there's that part that very thick part that is attached to the trunk right that is absolutely impossible to compost you have to store it and store it and a lot of people use it for fuel the farmers use it for all kinds of other processing things that they sell it for the leaves itself just the the thing with where the broom comes out the broom is something that also is very difficult to compost unless you cut it up and nobody has a time to actually sit and cut it up so the coconut itself is a very very very hardy plant all parts of the coconut are very hard except for the cocopeat and this cocopeat is what we use every day for composting what you cannot go in is all on the right side you can't put dead animals or they're put into it neither can you put their hair dead animals hair also do not put into your home composter if you want to compost your dead your animals poop and your animal hair you must do it in a completely different composter and you should keep that far away and you should mature it for at least a year before you use it um batteries and medicine you cannot put cigarette butts newspaper try not to put it's got enough ink then any anything on plastic disposals you should not put what you can put is all your fruit and vegetables all your cooked food which I said you shouldn't be running I put a lot of these bones of you know whether it's fish bones chicken bones mutton bones because a home actually doesn't eat that much and they remove all the meat usually tea and coffee you should put uncoated paper you can shred and put dried flowers egg shells you should crush all the seeds you should put what you need to watch out for is uh compaction while you're putting your composting in just imagine I have a lot of watermelon now watermelon has actually mostly water so it will release all that water and you won't you won't you won't actually imagine how much water it releases so you may have put little less cocopeat at that time when you're opening the lid and again looking at it when you see it's becoming a little runny you must add more cocopeat and stir it in so you're not allowing things to compact because the minute things compact there's no oxygen going in and you want to avoid that at any cost acidity I make sure that all my husband has the musambi juice every day so I make sure that I quarter all the musambi pills I don't put the whole things because once you if you put the whole things they're highly acidic and they get they take longer to break down and of course size in our big community composter once I remember had gone to check and I saw a huge watermelon it must have got one dent or something it got spoiled the entire watermelon those people had put without cutting it now you if you do things like that then it's going to much take much longer to compost so you shouldn't be surprised so you don't have to cut them into very small pieces nothing has to be cut to very small pieces nothing has to be ground like chutney but you can't put a huge full cucumber in your composter it'll take up too much space and we'll take too long to compost so just cut it at least quarters and chuck it in now the other thing we tell people is trust your senses you've got your eyes you've got your nose and you've got a sense of touch you by looking at it and good cooks will tell you that this works right all the good chefs will tell you I just have to look at it and I know where they taste so asar or salty or whatever so you'll also develop this sensibility and we put all these photos up just for you to see what it should look like and sense like this is what fresh waste when you just put in you'll see I use soap cuts at home to do my washing and you'll see the soap nuts over there that are squished out and this is how when you layer your cocopeat right you should layer it fully no waste should be seen that's one way to keep fruit flies out fruit flies will come and sit on rotten food anywhere even in your very clean kitchen if you have a rotten banana the fruit fly will come from somewhere and sit and then he'll ask us where did the fruit fly come from but flies and eggs are all over insects are all over we don't see them doesn't mean they're not there um so that's how your waste should look completely covered once you have put your days waste and put your days cocopeat over as you keep putting waste and cocopeat you might see this white fungus now that is a very good sign means that you're composting is having happening optimally if you see a grey or darkish blackish kind of fungus then you need to take action you need to mix it up and make sure you add more cocopeat and you add a little bit of microbes so you can get away from the bad fungus now this is what it looks like when I've just stirred it after 10 and you know filled the unit I've got the compost you'll find that the vegetable peels are still visible that's my watermelon oh no avocado I think yeah avocado and uh you'll find the roots and you can still see it so in 10 days it's still some parts of it are visible it takes longer for it to start breaking down now this is a bad pile this is what a bad pile looks like and this is what I was telling you know the maggots I mean this is very creepy right if you're not used to this you'll say what the hell is that but the beauty is this does not need to happen it happens only when you don't know enough about composting and even if this happens if I went and put actually enough cocopeat into this pile now and I mixed it in it'll all kickstart again that's the beauty everything goes back nature has this phenomenal code of making sure that it takes back everything that gives you so there's actually nothing wrong going to happen to that it's just that we've not grown up in the rural areas so we think these kind of things freak us out but this is a great way to understand a little bit of the balance that you know nature has that this is a healthy maggot population so when you start seeing maggots crawling inside you know yes it's going well all is well in God's world now this is too dry now the beauty about composting like I kept saying balance balance composting also teaches you balance because if you make it too wet you'll have a problem it'll start smelling maggots will come out if you make it too dry composting will completely stop because and I was very surprised so I went to one scientist in Indian South sands and said what is this I mean I thought you know it's dry you know it should dry out no you say no water is life on the film of water microbes live and microbes need to break keep breaking material down to its basic elements that's their job so when you have something that is completely dry like this you need to kickstart it you need to sprinkle lots of water you can add curd is an accelerator on what you call a microbial activity starter and it'll start living again microbes will come in they'll inhabit they'll start eating it up they'll have a party now this is too wet and smelly you can see it's wet there's a there's a sogginess to it and there's a kind of everything is clumped up a little bit so you need to add some cocopeat powder this is ready to see it's become brown material has broken down and you know that it's if you see we will get one round and whatever remains on top of the sieve I put it back into the fresh waste for composting and this is completely sieved now a lot of people say I don't have time to see and I say damn good you shouldn't have you you should not actually see if you go to this part and if I just took out some big bits by myself there's a ground nut shell over there I would just take that out I would put that back into the fresh waste and I'll just use this directly in my soy I'll store it for another one month and keep it moist and then I'll use it for my gardening I'll go to green essentials I'll buy my seeds and I will start gardening so you don't really have to sieve unless you want to sell your compost that tea like consistency is actually only necessary when you sell or when you buy when you buy you want to see it like this I mean you say you have to because that's what the customer wants but the plants really don't mean this the plants are okay with the others so that's how it looks like when you harvest compost so when you start composting today you start composting you can start composting in a bucket you can start composting in any container but please remember the container should have a lid and the container needs to have aeration holes so I will go to our product after this but let me start with testing in a bucket for all the people who have not done composting till now you take a 30 liter or 20 liter bucket you drill holes on the sides for drilling holes you don't have to have a drill gun nothing like that you take a sharp object like even your big needle or a you know screwdriver heat it on the gas and it will go through the plastic so you make these holes don't make holes at the bottom one third of the bucket keep all the holes on the top top two thirds after you made the holes you make the holes the gap of say this much this much say this much so like that right um after you made the holes you put your uh cocopeat powder in the base you put four fistfuls of cocopeat powder in the base you put your daily waste if you're a family of four your daily waste will not be more than a kilo of waste ideally so you put that waste and then you take another six fistfuls of cocopeat powder and you layer it next day do the same thing if you want to do twice a day no problem you put your waste you put cocopeat powder put waste put cocopeat powder if you put less waste than one kilo you put less cocopeat powder would make sure you cover it fully yeah clear so you've taken the bucket you put the cocopeat powder you put your waste and you covered it with cocopeat powder you do that daily so today when you start you will fill that one bucket in anything between five to ten days once you've done that you leave it you mark your day when you start the day you start after one and a half months you open that bucket in between months a week you open it and stir it up a little make sure that you've tested for moisture the moisture shouldn't be too less or too much so you've only opened it once a week you kept it closed after you filled it and one and a half months down the line you open it it'll be ready compost for you to use in the sense it's ready for you to take out transfer into a sack or another container and store it for another month keep it moist why do we see it store it because we don't know that we're not doing any tests to see whether it's completely become compost or not i would not advise you to use it for vegetable gardening if you wanted to for house plants then it's ready for you to use like indoor plants and all that once you do that and you feel huh this is easy and i managed it then you go buy whichever product you really want that it's as simple as that sorry you put your waste you cover with cocopeat powder daily if you just did this and didn't do anything else you didn't add any accelerator you didn't add any curd you didn't add um um any fancy thing you will still get compost and that compost will be rich compost so i tell people you try it if it works for you and if you don't if you have any problems during this time your maggots have come out or they've got some bugs or the extra fruit flies or they smell while you're doing this get on to a call with us 9 9 1 6 4 2 triple 6 1 we have a whatsapp doctor kamba helpline you send us a whatsapp image of your bucket you send us a whatsapp message we'll tell you we'll do a diagnosis and we'll get you going and confident once you're confident i promise you you will never give it up for life you realize that this is such an important and very beautiful thing to do because you're very excited and you say wow this is like too much i can see this black gold and uh you know it's a journey that you will you will always even share with other people so i just want to show you this this maggot shells look like that now i'm going to show you the black soldier fly maggot so we also have just for your information we have a sapling test and a jar test so if there are some gardeners who are very particular about when to use their compost and they have better knowledge about what kind of for the rows they have this kind of additive so if you're one of those us that gardeners you may want to test your compost before you use it so we have these two tests please have a look at it if you want to see this we we tell you that even if you don't garden right that's very important even if you don't garden composting is very important to do and we put together this fun set of eight things that you can do with the garden with the compost that you get and now um and you know people tell me what do i do i have so much compost i said but that's a good problem to have no you don't have so much waste but you have so much compost throwing out compost is much safer than throwing out organic waste it's safe for you it's safe for your earth and so think about it it's a good problem second thing what we've seen is the minute you put it up on facebook or your instagram i have compost lots of people will come to you and say gimme gimme gimme gimme and uh you can make new friends that's that's what we tell people composting brings you new friends and it does i i mean seriously it does so let let's let's see now our wonderful friend the house the black soldier flying so this is home composting now i'm just talking to you about all the problems that you can bring right you can get it can be wet and smelly we have answers to each of them too many maggots feski fruit flies all the units are full ants are everywhere lizards a lot of people are scared of lizards and sometimes lizards have this phenomenal way they'll sit inside your lid so what we we say is take a wooden stick and you hit it like this then you open it and then it'll walk out uh rain has gotten nothing is happening it's broken i've got rats the interesting thing about composting uh composters don't put it on um you know on uh on just earth because rats dig under it and then it topples ideally place your composter on a hard surface like a concrete surface in your balcony in your terrace anything that is uh rats don't actually dig under and also rats uh will be kept away if you plant a lot of mint within around it um so all these uh uh doubts are answered but this black soldier flying this is what the maggot looks like and a close-up of it is even more to stare it and say okay i'm not so grossed out about this every day this is a meditation say i'm not so grossed out about this i can handle it's only small it's big in the picture actually is that small yeah but trust me i've been there i used to think they're very gross but it's just something that you have to change your mindset about and it's very very easy to well it's easy to easy to do over time so what's amazing about the maggots manages all kinds of ways to eat your chicken fish everything it's very useful for feed it improves the quality of the compost it's much faster than learning compost and it controls a harmful fly populations and this is what it looks like the eggs are very small it becomes like this and if you see here this is how the fly emerges from that yeah and once the fly emerges this fly is actually harmless it lives only for six days and it dies so that's why it's called the black soldier fly it's completely harmless now i'm going to show you quickly how to do this is uh composting for um kitchen waste people are scared about the smell in kitchen waste composting but there's another way of composting that are only for leaves and this is not for coconut leaves this is for every other kind of leaf yeah leaves are very much more simpler to do they don't smell so much because if they put into our kind of leaf composters this is our product this is a leaf composter this these leaves actually are very very easy to compost because you don't have to look after them at all you just put them into this composter and daily water them and because it's off the ground here water percolates down into the earth and over time after about six months you can open that that door that is there and take out your done compost and leaf composting leaf compost is very very valued for its nitrogen content it's very valued for lawns because it doesn't have seeds of other vegetables like your home compost has and so it's extremely nutrient rich and you can put your twigs and clippings flowers dried leaves everything ideally speaking don't put too much treated glass and weeds and any diseased plants all you need to take is your garden waste put water daily you can put accelerator and you get leaf mulch and compost after six to eight months starting and we have films on how our products work of course i've already shared that with you and this is a very very simple thing to start with we have a range of products on this and now i'm going to before i go on to the next section i'm actually showing you our products i'll stop for a minute to take any other questions current yes punam so punam what i'll do is that i'm just going to sort of send out a poll or two while we wait yeah and then and then you know i in the meantime if kiran vinita and yoghita can kind of put together those questions which they would like to have answered at this point in time yeah so i'm just launching the first poll this is basically coming back to the question you spoke about at the beginning which is yeah how much difference do you think our individual action matters yeah sorry let's see what the people say yeah yeah and i think in the context of you know where we are right now and i think over the last couple of months we've seen that in in the places where governments and larger agencies have struggled to cope a lot of the stepping in and filling the gaps and in fact the leading work has been done by individuals and groups of individuals so you know if there was ever a time at which it could be clearly seen that individual action matters at least from my perspective i think that you know this last two two and a half month period has kind of demonstrated it very very powerfully yeah and it's always good to also have a contrary view i'm very happy to listen to it um i one thing i've learned by i mean i'm not an i'm not a conservationist by training or i'm not i'm just an ordinary ordinary person and at my ordinary person level i'm so fascinated by nature and i'm so one of the lessons i've learned is the diversity is very important and having people with different kinds of views and just having the opportunity to listen to them is also very important especially in the work that we do that's true no no absolutely uh so i'll just give it another minute while people are sort of answering yeah i think i'll i'll give you a couple of questions that i'm seeing here yeah one is that parvati says i have a lot of coconut husk in my home in kerala yeah what do i use that in instead of coco peat yeah coconut husk actually yeah so coconut husk has a string of fiber that actually in fact on youtube there are many films on how to make coconut uh powder from coconut husk yes but basically there's a very thin string which needs to be removed because that's a very fibrous string and that takes very very long to compost so people have to crush it or they have to pull out that fibrous bit and leave that string and in fact that particular string is used for core mattresses right yeah okay so so i think relatively i mean in terms of breaking down quickly that would not happen yeah and it won't absorb also it won't absorb your water that's what you need right that's coco peat for two reasons one is that you're putting it for carbon and you're also wanting to absorb the extra moisture and keep the moisture balanced right so i think shiv says that is it compulsory to stir the compost once a week i think your answer was if you're using coco peat you don't even need to do that yeah i would definitely say that once a full unit is filled that's a good thing to stir it right one unit so that means in the 20 liter bucket 15 liter bucket whatever one unit is because you're going to be using many units you will need at least four units at a given time for a family of four right yeah to handle your volumes of waste and the cycle of compost because compost will finish in one and a half months right and then you need space again so so that's the that's the logic and one of the things that i find most people can't get used to is this this continuous process thing that's right and it's like you know you're remember the last the first bucket you filled that you take out one and a half months later and then it keeps going like that and i'll explain the product use i mean later but if you just add three buckets in a row you fill one bucket you fill the second bucket you fill the third bucket and by the time you fill in finished filling third bucket your first bucket should be ready for you to empty i think we are the fillet shut it forget it generation so yes yes what you're suggesting is a little counter intuitive yeah so another question that i see is from sonika she says if i run out of remix powder can i just add regular coco peat that i can get from a nursery or online yes yes absolutely you can yes one thing just to add to this is yes this will fulfill the function of the carbon and absorption of water like punam said but the remix powder contains microbes so you would have to find a way to introduce them in in other ways either from kitchen waste itself or from em or something like that i guess yeah so that's that's important to do now microbes also fits your microbial activity in good health that's right always good to add that's right that's right so i think this may be a youtube question somebody called ramamanist okay it suggests do we need to have six or seven compostors to manage daily waste assuming the composter will fill in a week and then we need to close it and let it compost which will require whatever six to eight weeks to be ready yeah so you're not six buckets you need at least three okay so then these would work by rotation so yes yes as one got full then you would move on to the next and move on to the next and so on yes right so yeah so i think i'll repeat that a family of four will need at least four buckets of 20 liter capacity yeah or 20 kilo capacity so not 20 about 15 liter capacity sorry 15 liter capacity four buckets for one family of four right you fill one bucket fully right you start filling the second bucket fully after it's filled you shut it start filling the third bucket fill it shut it go to the fourth bucket fill it shut it by the time you fill the fourth bucket and shut it and right when it reaches the top take out the material in the first bucket to another container and start filling in that first bucket again right so what i'm going to do is punam i'm just going to end the polling and i'm going to run another poll that we have okay so i'm coming to this poll uh and running it now it says do you think decentralized composting is an important way to manage organic waste for our country especially i think in our cities yeah yeah so one one clarification punam i think when you were speaking earlier you talked about the use of fresh compost being okay i think you were referring is saying it's okay for ornamentals but perhaps not for food plants yeah i'm sorry because you yes for food plants i would always recommend that you mature it for another month yes so we basically put it in a container somewhere cool dry and kind of keep it moist yeah keep it a little moist and make sure that the entire decomposition yeah yeah it's like looking after your chart now you keep it okay let it be there for some time it'll become nice and mature and like a wise old person and then you'll use it right right okay so uh yes uh i think we've got a lot of responses to this i'll just give it half a minute more and then we can move on with the next segment of your presentation yeah yeah uh in the meantime there was one question from mr vijay kumar who was asking how to compost coconut tree leaves please guide yeah so so like i explained kiran the coconut tree leaves are are very very they don't want to be composted fast they are saying please let me be the leaves are talking to us they're saying we're very hardy we are a coconut tree leaf so you it's very very hard to compost coconut tree leaves easily and especially uh i don't know mr vijay kumar is there on this thing no will you share where where is it a coconut tree plantation that you have or is it only one coconut tree that you're talking about i think that might have actually come from youtube youtube okay so we'll try and figure that out but i mean coming from the other end assuming it may be either a plantation or a home garden or something like that uh i think one of the things is that just because you cannot compost it very fast does not make it uh i mean i still think it's a very useful thing to have around the garden yes all organic matter ends up being helpful around a garden or a farm i think mulching is where i would use it and it is frequently useful in places where you need something heavier you know in windy places especially or where there's heavy slow of water so what i might do is that i may incorporate my compost into the soil and then cover it with this heavier mulch which kind of holds things down yeah that's a wonderful idea right so uh i'll very good for mulch yeah yeah exceptional really uh okay so okay i'll one more question i was just going to bring this up so there have been several people bring up bringing up the question you know what will happen in the monsoons we are apprehensive about how our compost piles will be doing at that time yeah so our products actually are monsoon proof uh anything that is enclosed is monsoon proof you won't just we have all our customers actually keeping our products out in uh balconies and all you need to do is cover it with a plastic sheet against very very heavy rain but composting actually happens continues to happen it just i'm telling you composting is got a balance if those three things are in correct order i mean your nitrogen is correct your carbon is correct and oxygen is correct then the heat is actually generated by the microbes so the microbes will come only when the balance is correct it's like the protein and carbohydrates that are my body needs i actually have the right amount of protein i have to have the right amount of carbohydrates and if i have both and i can do all the exercise i need so that's the that's the the same logic is there for microbes so if the conditions are right the micro will do their job they'll generate the heat where you know and it's really not so dependent on ambient uh temperature you'll find even abroad uh if you're putting the right uh uh matter the heat is getting generated and there are experiments where in cold winter they've used composting to generate heat for people to sit around right absolutely so the important thing to remember is composting is it's a one heat generator it doesn't need the outside so much it's it's about the inside yes no and you know as much as some people they must be thinking it's sounding like half a chemistry lesson uh i i think when we are actually doing it you realize that if you're just doing two or three things right regulating the moisture ensuring you know aeration and ensuring that you are keeping your microbes health high if you just concentrate on just those three things i think in many ways uh you have all the other processes working for you in the way that you said you know temperature happening solving certain problems there less incidents of you know bugs and creepy crawlies and so on and so forth and uh again coming back to the context of apartments like i think composting is something that people understand and do pretty okay with when they have big gardens and spaces outside but when you're in an apartment that's when you know i think a lot of the lessons that you're talking about suddenly become important and our understanding has to be at a higher level yeah i see a question here which i think i'd like to answer is how so how do poor people do it that's a community project is more feasible any suggestions yes i make one thing a little i will unravel this a little bit poor people don't waste food yes and so they don't really need to compost in that sense whatever they even what they waste what i've seen is even i've seen um forget poor and rich people there are people who don't waste there are there are they know the techniques of using rind and skin peels and like i had my grandmother who would use everything absolutely adding all the grandmothers yeah yeah she would take everything that is even a peel that we throw away and whatever's rotten off we'll take one tomato and we'll say something is wrong with it and she put it into a soup or a stock or something like that yeah so it's a again i'm saying i what what we've learned is it's a mindset thing there is a whole this is not about poor and rich it's about what you're throwing away have you used fully what it is and whatever you're throwing away is it is it is it something that you can reuse or is it something that you have to go to a landfill that mindset shift that all of us have to happen and yes of course community composting is a very very important thing but i feel that there are like i've met poor people who have plants in their homes and they do put all the little onions peels which are really actually have nothing left in them into that plant yeah and they don't waste anything else they don't have the luxury to waste food and they understand some things or they have a way of looking at the world is slightly different from us but communities that means if you have say like a very dense urban space which has got a lot of offices and things like that yes you need to collect the food waste from there you need to have a community space to put it in and community spaces again the question is who will look after them who will pay for them who will maintain them and that we don't have enough civic sense i think yet in our country but we need to get there no i i think also what you said about mindsets i think another thing yoghita and i often observe is that if one is not aware of the fact that a lot of the mindsets that people who work for us or people economically maybe less fortunate than us have are actually absorbed also from contact from us so in the cases where their their views on waste may be similar to our or their behavior or at least about certain kinds of waste right it usually comes from their interactions from with us and our mindsets yeah so so like one of the things small example which i'll just before we move on quickly kind of mention is that as soon as you say that you're willing to dig your hands into your composter and solve problems that happen there or put waste there yeah that is the second at which your household help for example says that no no no no up till that point they may say no i'm not going to do it and then when they see you're willing to do it then suddenly they are like yeah okay now you know you know what i'll do it don't worry about it you know but that's the other reason why we started this because i really feel you know my father taught me that work is work there is nothing called less work or dirty work yeah there is nothing called dirty nothing and i felt that this is one of the things in india we don't have absolutely and therefore i said and you know people ask me why didn't you make this for the poor people i mean i in fact when i went abroad one of the things that you should make this for purple i said no it's like they there's a project abroad that says we will make a toilet which has got a plastic thing that you collect for slums i said no we have to make it for the rich people and only then will the you know we it's not a question of rich people everybody and like you say people are going to look at us and say if you're educated you're doing something maybe that's right therefore we have to do the right thing no i agree and also i mean just a relatively speaking there was as you were saying and i think what you were alluding to is that their waste footprint is like a small small fraction of any of us and and therefore perhaps a smaller challenge in that sense and what we are seeing now in india right look at all of them they're just walking and i'm saying india can walk i say i can't walk from here to my house people are walking the child took my it was just i mean that's what i'm saying so this i think our country is so diverse that we must remember and do what we can and therefore composting is very important to do i keep telling me this is very important to do okay so just one thing before we continue with the presentation zenab is pointing out she's she's our conscience over here so she's pointing out that we have questions even on the has geek page where people signed up i think we'll come back to those and answer them uh you know or after the session you with i vanita we will answer those and those we will certainly answer over there so punam we can continue perhaps you want to talk a little more about specific products so that they make sense to me so so let's just go so now we've talked about home composting with your kitchen waste we've covered your leaf composting in your garden and we've also talked about some of the basic problems that you can have while you're doing this the problems are not many they just smell bugs whether you'll get it right actually then only those three yeah all three are solvable problems there this is not rocket science this is not like sending a rocket to the moon this is very solvable we we are here to help you solve it so uh we uh now i'm going to actually go specifically and talk about our products the first product i'm going to talk about is the home composter we have a range of home composters and the just give me give it a minute to load yeah so we have a range of put plastic and terracotta when we just when he first started we started with a signature terracotta range my idea was to help uh potters earn a better livelihood get more money into their hands because this is a product that the urban environment wants it's a utilitarian product it's not a decorative product and because it's utilitarian and it's going to be used on a regular basis it may get more money into their hands and keep their skill and their traditional life and over time over these 14 years what we've managed to do because of the work and because of how customers have responded so positively to it that entire cluster in uh in telangana the government has invested about two crores to set up a common soil processing plant for them and they're doing pretty well of course in this covid lockdown they're facing some problem with the orders but we there we've they started supplying again so which is a good thing so this is the range of actually the terracotta range uh we have uh we have three kinds of basically three kinds of products we have a stack composter that means the units like I was telling you about the three buckets or four buckets that you know e they sit one on top of each other because otherwise people don't have space in their balconies the balconies are very small so this is just stacked yeah but the principle is the same you fill one bucket fully then you fill the second bucket fully then you fill the third bucket fully and in the stack one what happens is you empty out the first bucket into the last it's like that extra place that you had and start filling it in again then you have the row composting so here when you have larger houses in your space you keep this particular product this lever pot small that my point to result you keep this or this tiny lever pot in a row so you keep three of them in a row or four of them in a row depending on how much waste you generate you fill one completely then you fill the next one then you fill that and the last one and then by time you finish the last one this one is ready for you to use so that's a row composter then there's the earth composter the earth composter the picture is not here but it's called the prithvi and part of it goes into the ground very much like the pipe composting but there is a container that is half in the ground and half outside and there's another container on top this is what happens is you can actually harvest the compost and you need two of them in your garden and those actually look also very pretty and it's I will find a picture and I'll show it to you so these are the three kinds of composters we have in addition we have a community composter so you'll see here these are the home composter range in plastic this is called the chomp again it's like a row composter you add many chomps next to each other this is a gobble solo which is like a test kit so if you're not very confident cost only 600 bucks you buy it you try it out a lot of people actually bought it you know single bachelors people who are living in pg's who want to try it so we sell that product a lot to that profile of person and then we have this gobble senior which is for a family of four it's a stack composter and gobble junior please know that the gobble series and chomp series are available on amazon also so you can directly order and they'll ship it to you we also ship it to you and you can order it from our site as well then we have one more thing it's called the puja composter lots of people in india do not like mixing because they have some tradition and some feelings around the flowers that they offer for worship you can be in any faith but the flowers that they usually offer for worship are not mixed with the other waste and india has a tradition where those flowers were actually put into water streams and so i mean in urban cities where will you find that so we created a puja composter specifically only for those we call it holy compost so we have this is a ganesha here you will see and here you can grow some plants around it and here you can actually harvest the compost there are two units so this is called the puja rangoli puja ganesha so if i should just go to this product you'll see that this is how you use it you put your waste i mean your flower waste you put a little bit of water and some microbes and you get very good compost and each of these products also has a film which you can watch on youtube so i'd like to also share with you this community composter this is our community composter which actually takes large volume so a lot of flats all over india apartment blocks schools offices they have invested in this and again these also lined up you can see you fill one completely then you fill the other and after that is full you can take this out and this is done compost and in bangalore we are able to actually buy back this compost from apartment buildings and try and see whether you know we can and this particular session on what works how do apartments actually manage it what's the best way will happen next week in the next webinar so this is the these are the kind of products we have we also have like this leaf composting if you are very keen to try it in your garden we've done this for you and you can you can actually download the drawing if you're sitting in a city far away from a bangalore we don't like to ship this because it's just shipping just air right so we made it easy for you you can download the drawing here you can get it made fabricated in your local fabricator in your city and make sure that you follow the dimensions of the drawing carefully because you need to have it off the ground and you need to have a very good door sturdy door that doesn't rust over time and keep using it please note again we have films for this on the site and you can use it and dot your you see all these people are using it from various places and you have to keep pushing the leaves down as they go and then when you want to harvest them you open this gate you water them here you can see and you get really good very very rich leaf compost so I think I'll end here because I'll take questions about products please understand that lots of people will say can't I just use dried leaves or can I use sawdust again I'll reiterate it's all about how much water can be absorbed and what is the granular size sawdust if you're using it from your treated wood please don't use it because you don't know what kind of additives are used in that or what treatment has happened use sawdust directly from the mill which is pure wood sawdust but it doesn't have the same properties as a cocopeat problem so I'll take questions now because now it's 549 and I think we're getting close to the end right is it six o'clock Karan? Yes we will take questions now Poonam and I think we'll need a little bit time for that so I'll just wait for maybe Kiran to pass on some questions Yogita Vinita in case there's some something on YouTube that you would like to send across then we'll answer those two yeah sure I ended up answering quite a few of them already on the chats Karan okay so maybe the ones that you think are worth repeating here if there are some more so that even others who may not have received so okay I think I see a question here about coffee grounds yeah which is that coffee grounds from the coffee vending machine in the office can we put it in the compost bin yes absolutely I think with a lot of this Poonam I think it's about the quantities right so if you have to mix some into your existing composter then it works very well yes but I assume that quantities of one thing now like if I was if I had a coffee shop right and I wanted to compost only coffee grounds remember one thing like I said about diversity right somebody there was one farmer who told me you know you have a taste you want salt you want chilli you want saal you want you know you have all the shades of taste like that you have to feed the soil with all the taste so only coffee then the soil doesn't like so I can give you another example I think when we first opened our store we had a bar next door and it isn't as seedy as it sounds to people outside go out but basically you know people will come there and have a drink in the evening and have their snacks and you know prawns of course would be things that people eat but if this guy had leftover prawns he would dump half a kilo or one kilo of them into a composter a kamba at this time at the same time right okay and one would think that it would completely you know go nuts because I mean this stuff was just you know dumped in on top of whatever was in there but we found that if it was managed carefully we could incorporate that also by mixing in other ways or based and by using something like remix powder which is bokashi that's what we were using at the time so no absolutely I think it's a question of how do you balance it off like we have a we have a we have a bakery and what we do with them is because they there's only maida and all of that right right now that doesn't composite formants so we add panchagavya right so you have to add something that will balance it off absolutely there is another question from Sheena and she asked that I have a compost pit with a cover out in the garden will I have issues in the monsoon with a cover out in the garden yes if it's a pit I think water would still seep in because if it's goa I mean you're just not going to be able to deflect everything out from the pit yeah no no if it's a pit which doesn't have a concrete base and all that or concrete sides and all there's a problem right Shiv asks can you put date seeds in the compost yes you should absolutely then Sonika says I have the kamba my biggest issue is emptying the middle pot in the bottom most pot because it's really heavy heavy yeah yeah can I not just keep rotating all the pots I know the bottom one is open yeah no no actually yeah you're right Sonika in fact one of the things I think we can do where are you based Sonika she I'm not sure but she may be in goa I don't know goa okay okay no I think that Mumbai okay then I think you should actually go in for the gobble senior it's easier to lift it's a plastic yeah composter yeah much much lighter Madhu asks if maggots are on the lid should I let it be or clean it up clean it up absolutely Jyoti says we stay in a flat in Mumbai and I've been composting at home for more than 10 years we use a wireframe box which is 12 inch to height with a mess inside for aeration it's kept on our balcony yeah so he says we have a problems of a black bug that looks like a ladybug which started coming out into our bedroom and kitchen etc yeah yeah yeah these gives give us some tips so for them you have to take you our standard thing is take garlic green chilli and half a cigarette cut tobacco boil it up in one liter of water okay boil it for about 15 minutes and then spray that dilute that and spray it every day for twice a day and then hopefully that should get controlled which bugs are these puno actually this you will recognize them yeah I think there is one black guy who can be very very very prolific I don't know its name but I have seen it and I have seen it in some places some customers places and I wish I was like I had enough time to pick it up and put it in chloroform and go and get an insectologist to actually look at it and tell me exactly what bug it is which we should do in fact if anybody out there wants to research product on it please come and do work with us so maybe some maybe she can send us a photograph and that would help us yeah if I know it's the same bug there's one black guy who comes right right so so Viraj is in Bombay he's saying I have an outdoor pit that I've made with cement walls about four foot by four by five I guess feet I put leaves and kitchen waste is there a way to speed up the process I get a good amount every four to six months yeah so Viraj you should split that fitter in half put dividers in yeah yeah put dividers in and then you'll be able to get faster because it's your volume is too big okay minimum actually the volume that you should work with in cities is three feet by three feet by three feet more than that you will have six to eight months return right understood so it becomes a modular composter in that sense. Vinita is mentioning that it could be a type of feathering beetle just I mean I told you please understand Vinita is our researcher. Vinita is the person who has the brains in this company. So okay so Jayapriya says what was what does one do with the leachate? So leachate has two uses one is that you can dilute it and use it directly to plants it's very good nutrition well that's the best use absolutely or you drain it off into your drain and you clean your drain in the process right so there's another question which I think is being asked about disposable tea bags can these be added in not if they're not 100 percent biodegradable correct but but the tea bags what do they use some kind of synthetic material sometimes I mean right now if you ask me I can't tell and we don't know yeah now the even the organic materials have these microfibers in them just to make them last longer and yeah I think that becomes so I think we've answered okay Arthi says I'm using a kamba for more than 10 years and I shifted to a ground floor flat recently my kamba suddenly started attracting cockroaches how do I tackle it oh it's unusual yeah very unusual because cockroaches don't like composting okay so then maybe her heat is not building up okay you need to build up enough heat and there are the black soldier flame smell also the cockroaches don't like okay so something is not going right right so nilakshi asked about for her for her ground floor flat thing I was especially places it on a stool a plastic stool heavy plastics tool okay and then tries okay so one last question which nilakshi has asked about fabric I think you know it's been answered but should that go in thread fabric should it go into the composter for what I mean why would I mean yeah it doesn't you know waste thread in uh yes that if it's a completely cotton yes even our our hair can go in yes yeah though it I guess hair takes a long long time to break down no actually it breaks down pretty fast is it yeah okay fair enough uh so thanks punam I think we'll stop there yeah I'm sure that people have a lot of lot more questions that we need to answer I'll just kind of try and explain you know how we can do that so I think punam mentioned the dr. kamba helpline so the number for that is 99164 2661 I think I have that right yeah and and basically you can WhatsApp you know your images here and have your compost issues diagnosed for you and solutions provided please note that you most of you would have come and registered on the has geek page for this event there is a section over there for comments and discussion please feel free to list your question and we'll come back and you know answer them over the next over in a day or so most importantly I would just request all of you to help us spread the word to building societies and maybe even office complexes about the next session which is on community composting or larger scale composting I think quite often what I've seen is that individuals have you know made this connection between their waste and are very eager to kind of you know start composting but when they start interacting with larger groups of people societies on which they may be dependent for cooperation things kind of get stuck a little bit so I think that this will be a session in which you can perhaps engage your society or your friends can engage other societies housing societies for them to understand why it's important and more importantly I think how it can be done and if we can get a lot of people to engage with this I think that we can hope for cleaner cities I'm sure this also applies to larger institutions around food like restaurants messes and other places which produce you know a lot of kitchen waste I do know that we got a call if I'm not mistaken from Delhi or Noida where the police wanted to find out you know you know how can we compost our mess waste better so this was a few days ago good to hear that question and I hope we have them join us thank you immensely for your time and patience thank you so much punam kiran vinita yogita for backing things up thank you most of all Zainab for helping us put all of this together and Amog for putting up with us for a good one and a quarter hour because we have to rely on him 100% in order to make sure all of this works smoothly I would like to mention that Zainab Amog are from Hasgeek who punam mentioned at the beginning these are friends of ours who have pushed us into the digital domain at exactly the right time I think as the COVID situation happened and have forced us to engage with people in this situation I use the word forced very affectionately I do not think that it would be possible for us to do this without them and as I know it is not possible for us to do it without daily dump also great to see all of you here I'm glad that there was so much enthusiasm and interest and again as I said if you can please make it a point to you know pass the word along for the coming session that will be the next Thursday I believe the date is the fourth of June and it will be exactly at the same time which is at 4 20 pm or so 4 25 pm we'll get started for those of you who have already participated on this session you'll get an email for us from us in case you want to join for those who of course want to register for it they can go to the Hasgeek page and do that okay so thank you all so much for all this time and attention and wonderful sharing of knowledge by daily dump have a great day and have a great week ahead of you thanks everybody thank you very much everybody thank you bye bye