Outside Delhi's Jhandewalan temple are hawkers selling mata ki chunnis (ceremonial red and gold cloth) and garlands. With 5,000-10,000 devotees visiting every day, and most of them offering flowers, the temple generates about 200kg of floral waste daily. On Tuesdays and Sundays, it's upwards of 500kg, and during Navratri it can touch a tonne a day. Over the last year, though, the temple has been composting its flower waste, making sure it doesn't end up as an unsightly mass on riverbanks or in landfills.

Surendra Kumar, who has worked at the temple for 24 years, was trained to use the machine that was installed last year. "I put the flowers in the shredder with sawdust and bacteria, run the machine, and out comes compost," he says. He runs the machine every 15 days and gets about 30kg of compost every day. The surprisingly odourless result is in high demand with farmers from Haryana, local schools and a temple in Mandoli.

Religious sites around India are looking for ways to re-use or recycle floral waste, and startups and companies are lending a hand either with resources or technology. In Delhi, eight religious places have installed machines to turn flower waste into compost, as part of an initiative by Angelique Foundation, the corporate social responsibility arm of Delhi-based construction company Angelique International, and Lok Sabha MP Meenakshi Lekhi.

India's many places of worship generate close to 20 lakh tonnes of flower waste daily. Much of it ends up in landfills, where it doesn't decompose as it would naturally because it's mixed with other non-biodegradable waste.....Read more

Source web page: Times of india