Luz Avenue resident’s effort to make her street go ‘zero waste’

A few weeks ago, as a part of the Zero Waste Chennai project, Chennai Corporation officials campaigned door-to-door to spread awareness on source segregation and solid waste management. They also urged residents to involve in composting of biodegradable waste.

Since then, RamKy conservancy workers have been doing door-to-door collection of biodegradable waste and non-biodegradable waste separately in some wards.

Now, the RamKy workers at ward 123 have started this process at Luz Avenue 3rd, 4th, 5 th Street and at Kennedy Lane.

Padmini Rajagopal, a longtime resident of Luz Avenue 5th Street feels it is a good initiative by GCC and RamKy conservancy agency. For long she says, she has been trying to reduce the garbage at the Corporation’s bin kept diagonally opposite their house.

She says, “Since the bin is kept in a corner, people dump a lot of garbage including food, plastic, and construction debris in and around the bin. The secluded place also gave way for open urination. The place would also be very smelly that walking and even breathing became difficult at times.”

Padmini says she has been segregating plastic and kitchen waste even before the campaign started.”I started it as I thought it would be a good way to reduce a large amount of garbage from going to the dustbin. I have also been asking my neighbours to do composting but very few have done it,” she says.

Now, with civic workers collecting segregated waste, Padmini is hopeful that the garbage going to the dustbin would reduce and in turn, their street would generate zero waste.

So she is actively persuading her neighbours and domestic helpers to do segregation as well as composting. She has also been giving them tips. “If everything goes well, one day the bin can be removed from that corner,” she says.