WASTE MATTERS: People's Direct Action - Duty & Control

Alarming State of Waste - Urgent Call for Action

  1. Waste shows state of society.
  2. Packaging should be recyclable.
  3. There is no short-cut to convenience in Nature, some one or rather we all have to bear the cost of environmental degradation because ecologically we are all connected.
  4. Tipping points are domain specific. Avalanche in one domain can induce or catalyse avalanche in other domains through reasons material and/or psychological, ultimately purity of consciousness matters. So we really do not know how near we are to various domain specific tipping points or how much time we really have to act quickly at the levels of individual direct action and collective levels such as household, family, neighborhood, community, town, city, state etc.
  5. Quality of life is directly proportional to the clean healthy environment or inversely proportional to the invisible and visible waste surrounding us.
  6. Our life is too important to be left completely in the hands of others, such as the market or government.
  7. Cleaning the environment, by direct personal actions of individual citizens will prove and reassert the power of individual, and at the same time it shall expose the corruption of the imposed tax based system that supposedly exists to take care of the environment.
  8. Quality of life is directly proportional to the healthy collective consciousness or inversely proportional to the corruption on collective level.
  9. Improving the quality of life by individual direct action based waste management, shall clean the collective consciousness and improve the quality of life in all other domains.
  10. Once the individual citizens wake up, the corruption shall vanish. Once corruption vanishes, the quality of life shall naturally be restored to healthy level.
  11. Need to find simple, low tech, natural ways to handle waste.
  12. Industry created waste cannot be cleaned by adopting more of the same profit based industrial approach, that got us into the problem in the first place. We need to rise above the money based approach.

Strict Ban on Waste Burning

  • This is mostly done either out of ignorance or deliberately as a short-cut to avoid the labor of transporting the collected waste to its scheduled destination.
  • Burning industrial products' waste or packing material magnifies and environmentally distributes the toxins in waste, such as dioxins and others.
  • Burning the dry leaves' wastes precious composting biomass causes nuisance by degrading breathable air quality.

Common Citizens Purity Warriors

  1. Morning walks, evening walks, tourism, wherever possible.
  2. Carry waste bags in your vehicle.

E-Waste

  1. Wires.

Plastic Bottles

Good quality: Coke. Pepsi

Uses

  1. Cutting craft.
  2. Zero Budget Rain Water Harvesting ZBRWH.
  3. Pots.
  4. Dry food items storage: Rice, pulses and spices etc.

Glass Bottles

Good quality

Wine bottles. Cow urine. Honey. Oil. Decorative pots. Flower vase. Powder storage, dry powdered leaves Moringa, Karipatta etc.

Medium quality

Local wines. Sell to scrap dealer.

Broken glass pieces

  1. Collect using utensil holder.
  2. Sell to scrap dealer by weight.

Aluminum Cans

Clay Waste

  1. Kulladh for raising Saplings.

Building Materials

Broken tiles

  1. Indoor moisture insulation.
  2. Mosaic pattern.
  3. House repair.
  4. Craft.

Paper Waste

  1. Office waste.
  2. Cutting press waste. Todo lists. Short notes. Memorization.
  3. News paper. Magazines.
  4. Photocopy waste. One side for making notes.
  5. Origami.

Stationery

  1. Pens.
  2. Pencils.
  3. Erasers.

Green Waste

Discarded Produce

Eat partially. Remaining part for dry biomass and composting.

  1. Vegetable and fruit market.
  2. Vegetable on the road.

Dry Ridge Gourd (Tori in Hindi)

  1. Utensils cleaning.
  2. Dry composting.
  3. Body rub for cleaning.

Coconut Coir

  1. Utensils cleaning.
  2. Incense smoke.
  3. Dry composting.

Edible Rind

Water melon rind curry

Plants and Trees: Collections and Uses

Fruit

Amla, Litchi, Dheyu, Bel, Mango, Jamun, Rudraksh and Shehtoot.

Fruit Pods

Amaltas. Usage: medicinal, herbal.

Flowers

Decorative and medicinal

Amaltas

Fragrant flowers

  1. Nag Champa.
  2. Madhumalti.
  3. Raat ki raani.

Decoration

  1. Bottle-brush flowers.
  2. Dried purple flowers.

Edible

  1. Moringa flowers. Dry to store. Used in Curry and mixed with honey.
  2. Harsingaar flowers. Dry to store. Used in rice cooking and sprinkling over sweet preparations.

Leaves

Peepal, Ajvain, Tejpatta, Neem, Mahaneem, Harsingaar, Shehtoot (cures throat ailments), Amaltas leaves, Moringa

Edible Seeds

Musk melon (Kharbooja) seeds. Dry seeds need water soaking before breaking.

Banana Tree

  1. Fruit
  2. Raw banana as vegetable
  3. Stem as vegetable, salad and juice. Ayurvedic remedy.

Dry flowers and fruits for decoration.

Pine. Arjun. Amaltas. X-mas. Deodar etc.

Round Stone Pebble: Uses

  • These are commonly found in sand near rivers and the sand that comes as building material.
  1. Window stopper.
  2. Door stopper.
  3. Measuring weight.
  4. Physics experiments: pendulum, friction, equilibrium, rigid body dynamics, collisions
  5. Grinding spices.
  6. Nut cracking.
  7. Tiny pebbles in decoration. In a glass bowl or bottle. In light or under lamp.
  8. Very small pebbles in kaleidoscope.
  9. Chess pieces.
  10. Photo frame.
  11. Hot food base.
  12. Car stopper.
  13. Stone art.
  14. Stone structures.
  15. Utensil cleaning
  16. Vegetable growing stretch weight. Ex. Long and straight Snake gourd.

Waste Usage

  1. Educational use: Kabaad se jugaad, Arvind Gupta toys.
  2. Thermocol. Glass window insulation during winters.
  3. Newspaper and other paper can be used in paper mache for craft, utensils and papercrete building material.
  4. Onion, Garlic peels make excellent liquid compost very easily for household or kitchen garden plants.
  5. Kitchen rice, pulses soak water is very good manure for household or kitchen garden plants.

Reference

  1. The Story of Stuff: https://www.storyofstuff.org/ and https://www.youtube.com/@StoryofStuff.
  2. Deep Green Resistance: https://deepgreenresistance.org/about-us/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance.