Access to menstrual hygiene is of critical importance to health and well being of women. Menstrual and other personal hygiene waste constitute around 6% of India’s total municipal waste. The biomedical nature of this waste, unsafe disposal practices and lack of segregation at source creates hazards and challenges in waste management - especially since manual handling remains widespread. Any discussion on increased access to hygiene has to discuss the waste management. But given shame associated with the subject, focusing on waste risks further stigmatising the topic. On this subject, we spoke with Smita Kulkarni, Co-founder of Stonesoup, a bangalore based startup who is working towards creating awareness about sustainable menstruation.

A significant amount of textile is wasted in the garment finishing factories. Traditionally, this has been sold as mixed scrap to the unorganised sector that then downcycles it for lower end or finds alternative uses. While this keeps material in use longer, it continues or even worsens the social and environmental challenges of the industry. But it doesn’t have to be this way only. We spoke with Kriti Tula, a fashion designer and co-owner of DOODLAGE - a label that upcycles this waste into high street designs and products. 

Fashion as an Industry is notorious for being resource inefficient and generating significant amount of waste. Clothing is a basic need but fashion is more than just need to cover bodies. Sales process is a complex cocktail of trends, pricing, colors, seasons, distribution channels and much more. This results in significant leakage which creates waste not only of materials but also all the resources and labor that has gone into it. To help us walk through the fashion value chain and identify the hotspots for waste generation, we spoke with Anju Singhal Shetty who has long years of experience working with multiple leading brands in India.

Anywhere between 10% to 25% of all Fabric intended for clothing, ends up as waste on the cutting room floor. Besides fabric, there are several other items also that get wasted in process of finishing garments. in this episode, we spoke with Mr. Prashant Mithare, a veteran of over 25 years of experience in managing Garment and Textile Production factories to get a clearer picture of what kind of material waste is generated on a factory floor and what can be done to reduce or avoid this wastage all together

Innovations in multilayer packaging have allowed extended shelf lives and other protective functionalities to a range of products including food and clothing. However composite materials cannot be recycled easily with mechanical processes. In this episode, we spoke with Ms. Monisha Narke - Founder and CEO, RUR Greenlife to investigate what happens to this protective mulit-layered packaging at the end of its product lifecycle.

Weddings are grand celebrations in India, with music, dancing, ornate decoration and lots and lots of food. With such a large party and thousands of guests in attendance, wastage is inevitable, and weddings are the largest contributors of event industry waste in India. In this episode, we spoke with Trishant Sidhwani - Partner at Dreamzkraft to understand what can be done so that once the party is over, weddings leave footprints of memory only and not of waste.

An enormous amount of food is wasted at restaurants all across India every single day. It is easy to point fingers at them being irresponsible in managing their waste. But restaurants deal with several practical challenges in how to handle this waste. In this episode, we speak with Chef Amey Marathe who experienced these issues first hand and decided to do something about it. He brings the benefit of the insider’s knowledge and is building a business managing the bulk waste from kitchens.

Just under half of the urban waste is generated by bulk generators like industries, apartment complexes, and campuses. While in theory waste management is a few simple steps of segregation, collection, aggregation, and treatment, it is full of challenges at every step in India today. In this episode, we speak about the challenges with Wilma Rodrigues, founder of Saahas Zero Waste, who has been working in this space for the last 20 years. We try to understand the economics as well as the barriers that are hindering an effective waste management industry to develop.

Once the food from kitchen is binned, it is generally either sent to landfills to decompose or is sent to compost plants. But there is an option to completely recycle it in your own backyard by deploying anaerobic digesters to convert the waste food into fuel and also generate manure for the garden. In this episode, we speak with one such bio-gas plant manufacturer, Mr. Kabir Udeshi - Founder, Flycatcher Technologies LLP to understand the feasibility and challenges associated with this option. We also try to understand what is preventing this option to be adopted more broadly.

In this episode, we take an inside peek into the world of food rescuers who battle against time to save food waste while it is still fit for consumption. India has the largest hungry population in the world living in close proximity to abundant cooked food, but connecting the two dots takes complex logistical and storage planning. In this episode, we have as our guest Srishti Jain - co-founder of Feeding India (an initiative by Zomato) that operates at pan-India level with a mission to eradicate the problem of hunger and malnutrition.