Written by Caroline / 09 May 2010 /

Crossposted from The Tribune

She is fondly called the “garbage girl” of Bhagsunag. Jodie Underhill, a resident of England, had come to Dharamsala as a tourist. However, today she is actively involved in saving the higher reaches of Himalayas from solid waste spread by trekkers that as earned her the name of ‘garbage girl’ of Bhasunag.

Every week she can be seen on the rocky 7-km-trek that runs from the grassy summit of Triund through the hills of the Dhauladhar range, with a group of volunteers and donkeys bringing back 35 sacks of trash.

The bags, displaying messages for proper disposal of solid waste, can be seen at every tea shop enroute Triund and near the resting places of tourists.

While talking to The Tribune, she said, “I am surprised how such huge quantity of broken glass reach the virgin heights of mountains. It seems that trekkers carry beer and whisky bottles and are dumping there.”

She has managed to raise a group of volunteers from among the local youth and visiting tourists who have been named as “Mountain Cleaners”.

Written by Caroline / 23 March 2010 /

After months spent discussing with restaurants, students, NGOs, and wastepickers who work in the high-profile Khan Market of Delhi, we are finally ready to launch a waste management and composting project to manage the more than 300 kilos produced each day by restaurants, florists, and other vendors in this marketplace! All compost generated will be sold directly to consumers and used to build community gardens in schools and parks and rooftop gardens in the market itself! It's a great chance to showcase the true potential of decentralized community waste management!

Written by Caroline / 23 March 2010 /

The Kashmir valley, often referred to as Paradise on Earth, is famous for its beautiful mountainous landscape; in recent years though, Kashmir has seen rapid environment degradation. These changes have taken place due to various reasons such as deforestation, melting glaciers, and the depletion of snow cover. This has lead to problems such as shrinking water supply, shrinking water bodies and wetlands, soil degradation, etc. Further, J&K also faces problems such as under utilization of funds, technology inadequacy, lack of education and awareness on environmental problems and lack of government support.

Written by Caroline / 25 February 2010 /

At Azeotropy 2010, IIT Bombay's fest held in early March, students will be competing on effective Life Cycle Assessment - the analysis of the energy and resources used in the complete life cycle of a product or system. It will be an amazing learning for hundreds of students, to understand more about the power fo Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool for evaluating true sustainability. As the organizers say, "By this competition, we aim to encourage the use of LCA as a tool for corporate decisions as well as governmental policy-making in India."

The exact challenge is: "You have to carry out a Life Cycle Assessment of the "Production of ammonium nitrate from Natural gas" to calculate the total energy consumption of the process and make a poster for the same. System Boundaries are from Cradle to gate i.e. from raw material production to factory gate, and does not include the impacts of further supply chain or distribution mechanism. You have to estimate "energy consumption per unit production" that have incurred (directly or indirectly) during the process.

Written by Caroline / 24 February 2010 /

We've just found out that the Solar Car Tour in the Philippines has launched! Follow them online on facebook or check back here as we share some of the media they've created! We got the following incredible email from Vince Perez, the former Minister of Energy in the Philippines, head of WWF Philippines, and an Alternative Energy global guru. He wrote:

We finally did a similar project to Caroline's and Alexis' Climate Solutions Tour in India.

We have formed a corporate consortium and built a 100% solar power car dubbed “Sikat” (rays of the sun) in partnership with a local De La Salle University.   Sikat is currently on a one month national road show from south to north of the entire Philippine archipelago, visiting a total of 14 engineering schools in 14 different cities around the country.

Written by Caroline / 15 February 2010 /

During the late summer of 2009, two expeditions took me north into India, once to Himachal Pradesh to visit Spiti Valley travelling through the Rohtang Pass, "the end of the inhabitable world", and once to the famous Valley of the Flowers in Uttarakhand. In both places, I met creative and passionate individuals committed to changing the waste cycle - which otherwise sends loads of plastic waste from urban centers to meet tourist demands for bottled water and packaged foods up in the mountains, where it is left as an unfortunate legacy of the tourist recognition of the beauty and sacredness of the mountains.

I visited the Manali recycling center, and saw their waste compression unit. Waste is compressed into lower volume, higher density blocks which can be brought down to major cities to be recycled. In other areas, communities are attempting to manage waste in their own way.

Written by Caroline / 12 February 2010 /

The Maurya Sheraton has been composting its waste for over two years, processing almost 600 kilos of food waste generated daily from the six restaurants and hundreds of rooms inside the hotel, along with about 200 kilos of plant and yard waste daily, turning it all into high grade fertilizer. In doing so, the hotel has been able to eliminate all external chemical fertilizer use in the hotel's expansive lawns and has gotten international publicity for its work.

In discussions with the hotel's administration, we learned that they have been able to reduce costs dramatically by producing their own fertilizer, and the costs of the composting unit - about 10 lakh, or 20,000 USD - was paid for within the first year of usage. The excess fertilizer generated is donated to "The Ridge" - the forest lung of Delhi that has one portion running opposite the Maurya. The gardens alongside the road are all maintained by the Maurya at low cost due to donated compost.

Most interestingly, this entire unit takes up a very small amount of space and requires only two staff to manage the entire system. Both staff people are completely deaf, and were trained by Maurya Sheraton and Excel (the technology provider) to fulfill their roles using sign language.

Written by Caroline / 10 January 2010 /

In the summer of 2008, I spent three months with Infosys working on a number of projects with the Infosys team. Recently, I found this video of the solar golf cart designed while there: powered by both the building-integrated solar panels on the roof of the cart, and powered when plugged into the grid.

Written by Caroline / 12 December 2009 /

For the past year, some members of the community in Defense COlony have been pushing for more sustainable waste management for their Resident Welfare Association (the community organizations, called RWAs). A few women were able to create a composting area within a park in Block A, and find a financially sustainable model to employ a few former wastepickers to manage collecting, verifying appropriate sorting, bringing food waste to the composting areas, and managing turning the compost heaps.

By looking at other models for waste management, the team at the India Climate Solutions Project are exploring ways to replicate such projects -- either by generating community investment from an RWA or interested residents OR by generating investment from an outside party that would recover costs through future sales of compost.

Written by Caroline / 10 November 2009 /

The team at Kriti hosted a powerful training for students and other young people on how to make gift bags from newspaper, as a sustainable & beautiful alternative to plastic. Kriti hosted this event in partnership with the American Center in celebration of Earth Week.

 The process is incredibly simple, and requires only newspaper, glue, and a bit of string. A hole punch helped, but the kids I was working with moved right ahead making the holes to hold the handle with their scissors!