Composting with Dailydump Kambha

Seeing waste and reducing it or avoiding it at the source is an important step in leading a lean and sustainable lifestyle. And composting enables you to get the natural cycle back in motion. It would have been impossible to think of composting at home(at source) in an urban setting till we found DailyDump.

We started using the dailydump composting bin, the kambha, roughly a month ago and it has been some work and work in progress! Urban settings are designed for a non-sustainable living, a plastic living of you will. Things originate at one place sourcing materials from all over, leaving a trail of waste and pollution on the way and gets dumped elsewhere like this video from Story of Stuff illustrates. So any solution to compost in an urban setting is not going to be easy, it is designed to create waste. The kitchen waste attracts flies and urbanites scorn at flies and it is an indication of something not clean and it will bring diseases. Nobody thinks of it as a natural cycle of bio-degrading the natural waste!

So the flies are around the place at work in converting the waste into compost, but we are trying to get at an optimal number of flies by using a bit of neem cake, chilly powder and spraying the lemon grass oil as well as stirring the pile! You may not be used to the natural smell that emanates from the pile before it becomes compost, so it takes a bit of getting used to it as well. And the maggots are not a pretty scene either. It turns out that cokroaches are not interested in waste - hmm.. they need brand new stuff! But in couple of weeks you do get the smell of compost in the bottom vessel, though not yet ready for the plants!

While the natural open compost pits would let air and light onto the pile, the urban guerrilla compost pile needs to be covered to ward off the flies and maggots. This kind of slows down the natural cycle, but this is a descent compromise solution. So stirring the pile becomes really important to provide good ventilation to get the compost cycle going. Dry leaves may not be so common thing in the urban setting where trees tend to waste precious square feet, so you could substitute it with newspaper despite the ink to give the pile some variety and to suck the wetness out. But we got some help from the sweepers who would supply some dry leaves once in a while. Imagine if the apartment was doing it for the inhabitants - they could have made some money out of it. But the square feets of land are expensive and they find lawns more attractive wherever you find some space!

We also bought a leave-it-pot where you can leave the semi ready compost to degenerate into compost fully. Dailydump delivered it at home, a painted one, which looks odd among our terracotta pots and khamba. In fact they send a person(INR 200 for a visit) to help us sort out issues. Now we moved everything to a corner of our terrace which would give it more ventillation but needs some cover when it rains. It makes the kitchen and work area pretty clean and the flies are pretty much contained as well. And the first dump of compost is getting ready in the leave-it-pot and should be ready in couple of weeks I guess!

But it is worth a shot if you are worried about urban waste(watch that video again), especially if you realize that it will be dumped elsewhere, not recycled or composted elsewhere.You immediately see a drastic reduction in the waste that was dumped outside earlier. You don't really need the plastic bag everyday to prevent the leechate from the degradable waste anymore and it doesn't need to go out every morning! It is no more messy as earlier which makes it easier to find reusable stuff in it. And think about the compost for the plants in a couple of months from now - it sounds definitely worth the trouble.