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Farmland is disappearing ten to one hundred times faster than it is being formed. Biomass such as compost is critical for the survival of planet Earth, and its reduction has posed a threat to survival itself. The greatest advantage of compost is that not only is it a resource of nutrients for our food, it is also a tool for water conservation. Put simply, compost feeds soils, which in turn feed us. In the near future, compost will be the most needed item. Already, demand has increased dramatically. The use of wet waste generated at homes by the cities for compost in India has been well received by farmers. On the outskirts of Bangalore, one of the BBMP's waste processing centers saw farmers pick up 25000 tons of compost in March. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’s SWM rules 2016, says composting is a must for all Bulk Waste Generators. Municipal bodies have been empowered to implement the rules. There is an increasing awareness amongst people and compliance is improving. There could not have been a better time for composting in India. Now is the perfect time to start your composting business. Challenges in a business that composts biodegradable waste Farmland is disappearing 10 to 100 times faster than it is being formed. To produce the required biodiversity in our soils, we need more and more organic matter, more and more biomass. Compost is the biomass that is essentially the lifeblood of this planet, and reducing it has put our very survival in jeopardy. Not only does it improve the nutritional value of our food, but it is also our greatest water management tool. Simply put, compost feeds the soils, soils feed us. It will be the most needed item in future there has been a sharp rise in demand already. In India, there is a good response from farmers to compost made by the cities using wet waste generated at homes. One of the BBMP waste processing centers on the outskirts of Bangalore has seen farmers picking up to 25000 tons of compost in March. Challenges in a composting biodegradable waste business Composting companies are primarily influenced by three factors: 1. Segregated Waste Bringing the right type of products to the composting facility is extremely important. Hand-sorting mixed waste is the most common mistake. Though it may seem to offer job opportunities in developing countries, it is difficult to separate wet from dry waste. It is not uncommon for people to begin an endeavor with enthusiasm, only to be disappointed with the stress of stench and the unsanitary way in which they handle things. The foul odor emanating from rotting waste makes people leave. It is best to bring only separated wet waste into the composting system, as it can be treated directly without any manual separation. It is difficult to acquire such waste in areas where there is little understanding of the differences between wet and dry waste. 2. Composting quality Household waste (Green Waste) such as vegetable and fruit scraps, leftover food, eggshells, bones, etc. are rich in Nitrogen and proteins. They must be mixed with dry garden waste (Brown Waste) such as dry leaves and twigs. Compost made with this in mind will smell good and sell well. 3. Composting costs Some of the popular methods of composting, such as pit composting and vermicomposting, are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and very impractical for large volumes of composting. Organic waste converters (OWC) are composting machines that can convert organic waste into rich organic manure. Up to 30% finished compost can be harvested every day. Some OWC’s are very efficient and generate high-quality compost, while others merely burn the waste and call it compost. TALLBOY organic waste converters can produce completely digested, highly nutritious compost with an earthy odor for about Rs.2/- per kg. Composting is it a profitable business? Investing in the restoration of the degraded ecosystem can employ a large number of people while also putting us on a road to long-term sustainability. By living in self-sustainable environments people are in harmony with nature, which means that the next generation will have much better lives, so they will be able to take part in a richer social life, have greater wealth, have better diet and healthcare, and have better educational opportunities. Composting is not just highly profitable, it also restores our soils, the very basis of our existence, if done correctly. On average, a Bulk Waste Generator (BWG) produces 100 kg of garbage, which contains both wet and dry waste. In a given area, two people can manage eight to ten such BWG’s and earn upwards of Rs.100,000 per month from composting.

Sewage treatment using sunlight and soil :- This is a case study of one of our project sites called Pegasus. Pegasus is a team-building facility on the outskirts of Bangalore in an inaccessible and remote location, disconnected from the modern lifestyle of the city. This hamlet houses training camps spread over hilly terrain. Pegasus team building programs include heavy physical exercises, the participants take bath twice a day. When they started operations at this site two decades ago, there was enough groundwater and a lake nearby. But over the years groundwater depleted and the lake dried up. Typical water consumption of the site is higher than usual (nearly double the normal values of 135 liters per person per day). It was almost impossible to run the site operations without solving the water crisis. Any conventional STP technology requires all the sewage to be conveyed to a centralized location. Sewage conveyance is a very expensive part of any project. Selecting a proper wastewater recycling process and implementing it was a challenge to Pegasus due to the high cost of sewage conveyance. The conventional centralized STPs need many civil tanks, pumps, motors, and blowers, consuming a huge amount of electricity. Moreover, the sewage conveyance to a central location is not feasible due to the high cost of maintaining it. Treating sewage is not just a compliance issue anymore, we are beginning to feel water shortages and there is a strong willingness today in many industry segments to recycle and reuse wastewater. The day-to-day at RITEWAYS has a lot to do with reaching out to people with a mindset to conserve water and getting them to adopt our rejuWATER ® technology. rejuWATER® is a win-win situation for all. After completing the Pegasus site it is helping us to make people visualize what we tell them, this site has made our work easier. We are working on reaching out to non-government and charity organizations to sensitize them through this site and install such units in low-income group communities. They need us more. The Pegasus site presented a challenge and an opportunity to showcase to the whole world a unique cost-effective solution to a very big Sanitation problem that many underdeveloped and developing countries are facing today. Even though the packaged sewage treatment plant manufacturers claim to decentralize the system, sewage conveyance still remains a big hurdle, RITEWAYS implemented a completely decentralized sewage treatment plant one for each camp toilet. No sewage conveyance was required. This sewage treatment plant runs with Sunlight and Soil and recycles 40,000 liters of sewage every day to be used for flushing and gardening. With this availability of extra 40,000 liters, their freshwater is getting conserved.

“Out of sight out of mind” attitude is the biggest danger to all the waste management efforts being put in place after the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was kick-started on 2nd October 2014. Those who are simply interested in disposing of waste may not bother much about how composting works, they may just see the system as a compliance tool. If we don't recycle everything, we are only shifting the garbage from one place to another, and that's not a solution. The shifting occurs at a substantial cost, and all the resulting waste is disposed of in landfills, no matter what the effects on the neighborhoods. The key to any Zero Garbage Program is composting. When the wet waste is not mixed with the dry waste, the recycling industry is able to process the dry waste profitably. If wet and dry are mixed, no one wants to touch it! ‘Tsunami of e-waste’ to hit the world soon, warns new UN report: The sheer volume of production, lack of recycling, and poor abiding of laws mean that the globe could be in for a doomsday scenario, it notes. Recycling is the only way out and to speed up the process to be able to reverse the trend, we all need to understand a few things clearly. Participation of every citizen will be needed. When it gets decentralized to that level a big change can happen. Landfills, processing units remain a festering problem. “Noxious gases that escape such landfills and toxic effluents are constantly contaminating soil, surface and groundwater aquifers,” the report says All Bulk Waste Generators are required to install in situ composting under the Solid Waste Management Rules 2016. This has resulted in an increase in demand for composting machines and a mushrooming of composting equipment manufacturers. Compost protects land from soil erosion, produces healthy food, and holds water. The irony comes when the wrong composter is chosen. In the absence of guidelines, organic waste management is left to entrepreneurs. Government must identify this line before more instant composters generate ash. Unauthorized instant composting machines cause problems for apartments. Burning mixed waste, consuming high-power sources of energy, and dumping such compost into the soil is [hazardous] for the environment. Using TALLBOY organic waste converters, kitchen and garden waste is converted to rich manure without the use of heat or electricity. Compost that is produced naturally has a high demand, and buyers are willing to pay a premium for it, which results in highly profitable resource recovery. TALLBOY systems produce compost ten times cheaper than heater-based 24-hour automatic composters. REFERENCES: Landfills processing units remain a festering problem, a report Apartments fall prey to unauthorized instant compost-making machines BBMP to stop lifting wet waste from complexes in bulk Tsunami of e-waste to hit the world soon warns new UN report Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 Absence of guidelines leaves organic waste management at the mercy of entrepreneurs Zero Waste Model - Ambikapur, a presentation Harmful environment Bengaluru citizens group slams instant compost machines

Day Zero is Such an extreme event that could become a common Incident worldwide, it’s something that needs a lot of attention. If the lakes and rivers are no longer fit to feed our drinking water needs and if we have exhausted the groundwater, what is the next option left? What took centuries for the groundwater reservoirs to fill up is getting depleted very fast which will lead to day zero very soon according to analytics. Though the groundwater data of some of the big cities is quite alarming, it is still time to correct the situation. Nature has its abundant ways to cure when the human scarcity mindset fails. Our design needs to get completely decentralized, to a level where every individual becomes accountable. Though it’s tough and scary as it sounds but an effort in that direction can set a path to recovery and can prevent this scary thought of day zero. Centralized installations to provide good service and a better lifestyle to its citizens in the name of "development" seems to be a failed idea from Nature's point of view. The developing nations have this one opportunity to correct the situation. Self Sustained living is not a choice to make it a NEED to become a way of life and needs to be taught from childhood. Many schools and many communities have started to adopt this and it shows very good results. People are excited to do composting and happy to reuse recycled water. Then Why is there so much emphasis all the time to build centralized STP 's and SWM resource recovery systems by governments all over the world all the time? There are many organizations working hard to turn around the situation from "Landfills" to "Zero Garbage" from "Day Zero" to "Toilet to Tap" and the team at riteways has been working on the same for the last two decades with many interesting success stories to share, but the team is now thinking differently. If "Follow the money" is what is driving this world, riteways have rephrased it to " Follow the Good Money ". The franchising team at riteways is busy planning campaigns to create awareness about its "Franchise Opportunities" to gain traction for their new slogan. Sustainable Living is not just living in harmony with nature, it is also highly profitable. This is what the riteways team believes and is now working on ways to show how simple it can be done.

Animals don’t dig the earth to quench their thirst, I have never seen that in my whole lifetime! Have you?. They all gather around the water body and drink from it. This water body that is fed by rainwater is a treasurable asset to them. Also, my observation is that all animals living on land, urinate & defecate on the ground, this fertilizes the soil, we all know it! There are two very important facts that I wish to highlight here, One, by default our drinking water source is water accumulated on land. Nature’s way! Two, we can not defecate and urinate in water, forbidden! That would be a big messing up with Nature’s work And, that’s what the human civilization has been doing for centuries! We shit & piss in Commodes & Bidets all this collects and mostly ends up in rivers & lakes. Rivers & Lakes are drinking water sources for both animals and humans. When these pristine water bodies are no longer usable due to our pollution we turn to groundwater. In the megacities, if you try to visualize the cross-section of the earth below you, for a certain depth you would perhaps see millions of straws and tunnels. I mean if you took out all the pipes and laid them in a straight line, you could walk to the moon! All these straws (borewells) sucking up the groundwater have depleted the groundwater and animals can’t dig borewells. What took centuries to get deposited in the ground is gone is just a couple of decades! When does it get scary enough? Maybe when a 1L water bottle becomes Rs.1000/- or so…? I write this as if I’m not a part of all this! Ironically, we all belong here, There’s no way we could give up our lovely commodes & bidets, in fact, the drive is always to see how more and more people get access to these. So is there hope really?
continue reading my blogs… Neeraj

Rain is nature, nature works in abundance. We pray for rains to arrive and when it arrives it doesn't stop and we pray again!. Rain forms puddles, ponds, lakes, and rivers that continue to feed us freshwater eternally. This is nature's design "eternal supply" & "free of cost". Every life-form's love rainwater! All you need to collect rainwater is "folded hands". Stretch your imagination and engineer the idea & you have a beautiful solution that can not only make us self sufficient with water but also with nature. We could create our own puddles that can feed us eternally with all our water requirements without making any changes to our existing flushing habits. At riteways, we always look at nature for solutions whenever we sit down to design anything. One thing that always reflects in our products is the "abundance" approach. For example, our designs for sustainable living when we talk about water involves collecting rainwater in a way that one could use the same for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing. The same water after all the usage gets recycled for reuse in flushing and gardening. With this design approach, our puddles would never dry out? Every rain would fill them again to a level that you wouldn't have still run out with when the next rain arrived. Rainwater is pristine. Those living in areas with rainfall are very lucky to have it. We believe if there is rainfall in an area, there should not be any water crisis. It's just a water management issue. When "rainwater harvesting" is combined with "wastewater recycling for reuse" it is a sustainable way to manage water. Whether this can be done for an individual or can it be scaled to an institutional level are a matter of engineering. At riteways, we have been implementing these solutions for many years and have seen many successful applications. Those who own such systems are very excited to have implemented it . "There is a great joy in Sustainable Living, living healthy and spreading good health" This is our riteway! -Neeraj

Nature is the SOURCE and all the products that we use are the DERIVATIVES. . If we continue to be more concerned about the derivatives than the source we are all doomed. For example, let’s assume that Mango is a derivative of the Mango tree. This means that the Mango tree is the source that has the potential to produce unlimited Mangoes. It’s quite clear that here in this example Mango tree is much much more valuable than the Mango itself. But when it comes to our daily life how does it work out? Chopping off a Mango tree isn’t that painful as discovering a few rotten mangoes when you open the packet at home! In other words, the derivative has become more valuable to us than the source or nature. All the products that we use in our day to day life are derived from Nature. There would be no products if Nature gets destroyed, this is not sustainable. Our soils have lost fertility due to current agricultural practices and excessive grazing. Our soils today, need more & more organic matter, more & more biomass to produce the needed biodiversity in the soils. When you have these forms of degraded states people are in a cycle of poverty and ecological degradation. They only continue to be poor and they move this poverty from one generation to the next one. If we choose the restoration process, we’ll see that the next generations will have much better lives. They will be able to engage in a much wealthier social life, they will have different cultural shifts, they will have increased income, they will have a better diet and health care and educational opportunities, everything will be different. Investing in the rehabilitation of the degraded ecosystem will definitely be a cost-effective way to address many of the challenges we face today. The source of wealth is the functional ecosystems the products and services that we derive from them are the derivatives. It’s impossible for the derivatives to be more valuable than the source and yet in our economy now as it stands the products and services have monitory values but the source the functional ecosystems are zero. We have created an economic theory based on this flaw of logic, if we carry that flaw in logic from generation to generation we compound the mistake. If money is based on functional ecosystems, the world will be wonderful. If money continues to be based on the creation and consumption of products and services, we will transform it into a desert, which is the world for our generations to come in the future. “We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children”. Native American Proverb Neeraj founder — RITEWAYS

Home farming has become popular since the Covid-19 epidemic has hit the planet and lots of people want to eat healthy and organic food. The inability to grow all vegetables is a big challenge faced by hydroponic greenhouses. Home farming veggyBARREL® on the rooftops can produce not just vegetables you can grow trees in them. And all this at a fractional cost of a comparable capacity hydroponic system. If applied to commercial use, it would mean a fresher product from a commercial veggyBARREL® Home farming, less spoilage, and lower transportation pollution than a comparable rural operation plus, the consumer has a warm feeling of participating in a local food network. On one hand, we want to encourage people to grow a portion of their food at home and on the other hand, we want to link urban residents with their food as a business opportunity through franchising, "Neeraj said riteways.org founder and CTO. A decade of R&D and product testing by master gardeners before commercially launching it into the market suggest a healthy future for riteways in the urban agriculture landscape with veggyBARREL® home farming systems. But while it makes common sense that growing crops as close to the people who consume them as possible is more environmentally sustainable than exporting them around continents, it has been more difficult to pin down evidence that urban agriculture is good for the environment. This is due to the lack of simple and affordable solutions available. The commercial indoor vertical Farms that rely on artificial lighting and air conditioning or hydroponic systems that can produce mainly salad leaves are too complicated and limited by what they can grow. veggyBARREL® is looking to bridge this gap by bringing in the Urban farming systems that can produce almost everything that we eat with a very low footprint. The water consumed by each veggyBARREL® is 80% lesser than the conventional farming methods. While cities and states have started encouraging urban farming, home farming & vertical farming, it remains an open question of whether growing food in cities would eventually make it greener. Will the tradeoffs be worth the amount of food produced? For this reason, riteways have introduced the veggyBARREL® Franchise starting Rs.5 Lakhs which is a very low-cost way of starting a foolproof business. This franchise is available as one per Pin code so that there's a big network and the end-user gets proper hand-holding. If fully implemented in cities around the world, Home Farming could be a big solution for the global food crisis. Researchers hope that scientists, as well as urban planners and municipal officials, will be inspired to start taking urban agriculture more seriously as a possible sustainable way of living. It may not be possible for urban farming to replace traditional farming completely, but it can play a role in getting people closer to their food and making our cities more diverse and exciting and green. Got questions on veggyBARREL® home farming systems? Get in touch with us in the comments or call us at 901 903 4000. For franchise related queries please fill out the form here: www.riteways.org .

The earth element in us CARBON is what comes from the soil through the food we consume. Scientifically all our recipes are nothing but fats, sugars, carbs, proteins... Look deeper in the structures of these molecules and you will find C, H & O arranged in different patterns. Hydrogen (H) & Oxygen (O2) can come from air or water, Carbon source still remains Soil. We owe a great deal to this valuable resource and it's time we looked at things differently when it comes to Soil and Food. Carbon in soil becomes crop, gets harvested, and sold. It's one-way traffic, no Carbon is coming back to this soil unless one adds sufficient biomass or compost. Carbon cycle, photosynthesis with the carbon cycle, biomass, carbon sequestration by plant, all are natural engines of our ecosystem that can feed us tasty organic food without much struggle. We have free access to all elements, the sunlight, the biomass waste product, the rain. If you are looking for any help related to growing organic or building the soil, do let us know through below form submission

Organic waste composter system design is a different approach than conventional composting methods. The well-known pit composting & worm composting is very slow, labour Intensive and space consuming. Adopting such methods for "Bulk Waste Composting" can be very expensive. Rite-ways introduces MVLD vertical digestion technology that does natural composting utilizing very little space. Digestion of organic waste is accelerated using Cellulolytic & Lignolytic strains. TALLBOY® Organic waste converter uses Bio Bins that digest all the incoming mixed organic waste including coconut shells & bones, without using electricity or external heating. It is completely aerobic and converts food waste to rich manure without any foul odour, flies or pests. TALLBOY OWC takes in green waste daily and converts it to compost daily. Process of Organic Waste Composter -TALLBOY® For any organic waste composting system to work as an integral part of a solid waste management program segregation of wet waste source is a must. A household generates 750 gms to 1.25 Kg of kitchen waste per day. This segregated wet waste from all homes in that particular community is bought to the composting location where TALLBOY® OWC is located for composting. TALLBOY® Organic waste converter speeds the process by providing bacteria and other decomposing microorganisms with an ideal environment. The scraps should be tiny in size to maximize the surface area that microorganisms can feed on. This size reduction can be achieved by verCHEW® pulverisers from riteways. Eventually, all organic matter breaks down. bacteRITE microbial inoculant is applied to the composting pile through verCHEW pulverizer to accelerate the composting process. Decomposing organisms need four key elements to thrive: nitrogen, carbon, moisture, and oxygen and they consist of bacteria, fungi, and larger organisms such as worms, sowbugs, nematodes, and numerous others. For best results, mix materials high in nitrogen (such as fruit and vegetable scraps, fresh grass clippings, and livestock manure) and those high in carbon (such as dried leaves and twigs). To make best quality compost, Carbon to Nitrogen ratio should at least be 20:1 Organic Waste Converter TALLBOY®: Features & Benefits Key USP's of Organic Waste Composter TALLBOY® • Half-day composting • Easy to operate, unskilled worker • Carbon negative, Green Technology • Low CAPEX & OPEX • High-quality compost output • Highly profitable Frequently asked questions about Organic Waste Converter TALLBOY® 1. How is the availability of parts and maintenance in case of repair? We maintain enough stock and can be shipped ex-stock within 48 hours. 2. Pulverizing capacity per hour? verCHEW pulverizers are available in 3 models as bellow: • 50 Kg/hr verCHEW® 50 • 200 kg/hr verCHEW® 200 • 500 kg/hr verCHEW® 500 3. Can it be used for garden clippings/twigs and non-veg food items? Yes, ours is the only OWC in the market which can take bones, eggshells, garden clippings, twigs and even coconut shells. • YouTube Link: https: https://youtu.be/Az87r5-y2Q4 4. What are the external dimensions and material of construction (MOC)? • Machine: 3ft wide x 4ft long x 4ft height | MOC: Hardened & corrosion resistant Steel • BioBins: 1m wide x 1.2m long x 1m height | MOC: HDPE, GI & PVC 5. Since the compost in the bio bin is solid food for insects, how is your system designed to keep away cockroaches and rodents during the composting process? We haven't had any such incident reported to us, also haven't seen cockroach/rodent issue ourselves, whenever we have visited the sites, over the last 5 years and nearly 100+ sites. There are two reasons why this doesn't happen in our system: • Because rodents get attracted with putrefying odour, we have taken ample steps to ensure that our composting is completely aerobic without bad smell. • We use fine SS mesh all around to prevent any such entry into the BioBins. 6. Can the openings in the bio bin for aeration, not lead to stink during the composting process? It's vice versa. The aeration vents and the internal piping mechanism is designed to allow the breathing of BioBin, that is inhaling happens through aeration vents and exhaling through the central pipe projecting out of the BioBin. This leads to aerobic digestion. There is no foul odour when anything decomposes aerobically. Good composting practise requires about 30 to 40% moisture content. Our BioBins are designed to allow to retain the moisture that's needed, the rest gets drained out. 7. What material is the TALLBOY® BioBin made of? How many years does it typically last? • MOC: HDPE & SS 304 • Life: ~5 years. Easily repairable, no moving parts. Primary Applications of Organic Waste Converter TALLBOY® • Food waste processing units • Vegetable Markets • Milk product markets (Doodh Mandi) • Fish & Meat markets • Agro farms • Sewage treatment plants • Hospitals • Hotels • Large canteens • Apartments • Marriage Halls • Educational Institutions • IT/ITES/Business parks • Factories • Shopping Malls TALLBOY® Organic Waste Composter awarded "Best Organic Converter of the year" Still, got questions? Get in touch with us in the comments or call us at 90190 34000. For franchise related queries please fill out the form here: www.riteways.org