Kachra Co: Value Your Waste

Kachra Co. is a tech-enabled social venture with a mission to enable communities to mange their wet & dry waste responsibly. It aims to reduce the energy and capital investment that goes into waste segregation. 

We leverage the power of tech to enable communities with data-driven decisions, build responsible behaviour changes of waste segregation at source. We aim to bring transparency, structure and accountability into waste management ecosystem.

Kachra Co. is a self-sustainable feedback framework that can be adopted by any community from Kerela to Kenya.

Kachra Co. aims to uplift the people from the ignored, marginalised communities engaged in sanitation work by providing dignity and rights to the peopel.

Urban Indian population produces 62 million tonnes of waste annually, almost 40-60% of which is wet waste that could have been composted at community level, thereby leading to estimated 30 million tonnes of waste. 

Segregation and responsible composting is the most lowest hanging fruit with multiple ancillary community, environmental, and economic benefit. 

Kachra Co enables this via IoT based measurements at every stage and AI enabled optimization, to pick up the waste from the residents, keep informing them of their community waste performance, and responsible disposal within 5 miles of the residence.  Kachra Co is a community-powered framework which allows waste producers to responsibly segregate the waste at source. It brings accountability in the process, by creating a data and incentives based relationship between waste producers & waste collectors. 

In this process, Kachra Co uplifts the ignored, marginalised communities by formally including the sanitation partners into the waste management system - it provides the necessary support, respect & dignity of labour. People from these communities risk their lives by exposing themselves to a cocktail of untreated waste.

Waste Management is an ignored, menial, mismanaged problem in India and across the world. Kachra Co partners with community leaders, waste collectors/partners, municipal corporations to come together to optimize and add value through these steps : 

1. Kachra Co ties up each community residents with their waste collector encourage a relationship between the two.
2. Through direct partnership between waste generator and collector, it ensures proper segregation of wet and dry waste.
3. The segregated wet waste is composted at a community level, thereby reducing overall community waste production by 50-60% 
4. Kachra Co partners with local municipal corporation and businesses to distribute the dry waste to the source companies for recycling.
5. Central to all, we put IoT sensors to measure weight and locations at every step to build accountability, optimisation, and incentives for minimal waste production along and responsible disposal

Kachra Co initiative is a positive feedback loop which enables a self-sustainable ecosystem. A unit-level thing - an idea that can be replicated across any community.  This positive feedback loop is applicable to your community as much as it is to mine.

A framework for communities for positive impact on climate change.

Social Impact:

1. Reduces administrative burden on government
2. Provides better service to households
3. Brings accountability & transparency into waste management
4. Recognition of individual impact

We leverage tech to digitise & introduce a data-driven approach to the waste management process, which brings transparency & accountability of waste management on communities and households. We provide households with a tech-driven solution that helps them better track and manage their waste disposal, meanwhile also making them aware of the waste & drive change.

Local Municipal Corporation:

• Helps the local community manager to schedule & coordinate the waste pickups on a daily level - thus drastically reducing unnecessary trips to household
• Gets community members more involved in the process by introducing a segregation score which incentivises good behaviour such as segregation at source.
• Long term data collection helps the policymakers to better understand the trends, leading to better planning, allocation & utilisation of resources.

Household level:

• Users can track & monitor their waste disposal, which brings cognisance into their minds about the waste they produce. In long term, it can lead them to make smarter product choices driving sale of environment friendly alternatives in the consumer market.
• To bring behavioural changes into the lives of users, we have enabled our scorecard system where each user will get incentivised for proper waste segregation and gets nudged for incorrect disposal unless they.
• Kachra.co brings one more service i.e. waste management under the ambit of your smartphone like nearly all other utilities. In a society like India, this sort of transition in semantics can bring about a massive cultural & mindset change, from a untouchable's job to a respectful service like internet.

Kachra Co is a dual rating platform that incentivises responsible waste disposal on both individual and community level. The system consists of a 2 components:

Hardware part for monitoring waste disposal at site placed in household, it measures weight of dry & wet waste every hour, and sends the data to DB over internet. It's made of proven "off-the-shelf tech, consisting a load cell, battery, some wifi chips, microcontrollers & some basic circuitry. Avg cost of smart Bin should be around ~ $30- $40.

Software - An easy web based PWA, for tracking the waste cycle with 3 types of user A/C

Household

• Monitor the waste generated on hourly basis, and other long term trends
• Manage complaints & feedback
• Get community updates about composting pits
• Waste pick up notifications
• Segregation score
• Search for segregation learning
• Futuristic, AI enabled object detection

Community waste manager

• Onboard & manage the household relationships
• Provide updates to community

Sanitation Workers

• Plan the daily pick up routes for each sanitation partners
• Optimise and mark daily pickup points
• Provide the segregation score in the form of feedback

As of today, as soon as we dispose off our waste, we also dispose off the responsibility from ourselves without thinking where that waste is eventually ending up.

We show empathy towards our planet when we see images and documentaries of our waste ending up in the ocean and landfills, but since we fail to see the direct impact of our actions, we fail to recognise the consequences of our actions.

Kachra Co creates an ecosystem which develops cognisance among people regarding waste segregation at source. It educates people on correctly classifying waste into wet and dry segments. The outcome of these actions brings transparency & accountability into the hands of people, reduces the burden on the civic bodies & creating value with proper management of waste. Kachra Co. thrives on community participation by creating meaningful relationships between the waste producers and waste collectors working towards creating social & environmental impact.

The long-term impact would be creating responsibility among people for their waste by developing habits & bringing behavioural change in their lives. The sanitation partners from the neglected communities will be empowered with respect & dignity. These new habits will reduce the overall carbon footprint on the planet, make people more empathetic towards the environment & to the people working in the sanitation community.

Currently, we are conceptualising & testing the prototype in a single community of ~ 50 households. We will be moving to the pilot stage in the next couple of months and aim to serve ~200 households by the end of this year. Once finalised, this framework can be scaled and replicated across many communities - hence, by next year, we aim to serve all communities & household complexes in Delhi NCR, India.

In next 5 years, our approach to scale is to replicate the Kachra Co framework in every major city in the world.

For unit level, consisting 100 households, we have:

• 6 pickup workers with rotating shifts in compost, pickup & drive duties
• 1 community manager to oversee the ground forces, and manage customer relationships

2 + 2 on drive & pick up trucks

2 ppl at compost pit

City Head

• Expand to other communities
• Take care of dry waste, & sell to the ecosystem
• Liaison & coordinate with Municipal agencies

Globally, 2 tech ppl (one full time for incremental improvements & 1 consultant). The tech system is as such it can be delivered within a couple of month by 2 contractual workers.

One time installation of smart bins in the households

• Monthly subscription based model for waste management
• Standardisation of service charge of waste partners
• Selling any sellable dry waste in the appropriate recycle marketplace
• Revenue based subscription with local nurseries, organic farming institutions etc to sell surplus compost

We capture value by delivering relevant data and insights which enable the stakeholders to make direct or indirect improved decisions.

As the growing economies across the globe observe an increase in urban population, consumption level & rise in per capita income level, the waste industry is expected to reach $530 B by 2025 globally & $14 B for India.

For India, increase in consumption has led to an increase in the levels of municipal wastes across the Indian states. There lies a market opportunity in the country, where close to 62 million tons of waste is generated on an annual basis & is expected to increase by two times by 2030.

Proactive governments, civic bodies, townships are customers best aligned to adopt to Kachra Co framework. These bodies can not only adopt environment-friendly alternatives to waste management, but also create dignified jobs in this process.

Kachra Co's self-sustainable model is easy to replicate & scale in multiple communities, societies, institutions, townships located in any part of the world.

Leveraging the power of technology & communities, we aim to replicate the Kachra Co framework into every major cities in the world.

The mentorship opportunities from the Solve community of social entrepreneurs & change-makers will help drive the social innovation needed by Kachra Co. The global exposure & interdisciplinary guidance will help us navigate through the challenges involved in scaling our framework in communities all over the world

The burden of waste management, over the years, has become a problem left on the civil administration and waste collection communities to handle. To this day, waste is treated like a dirty & untouchable job, meant to be undertaken by the poor & marginalised communities who are thrown into the risky business. 

The shift in responsibility from the hands of waste collectors to waste generators demands a behavioural change into the lives of people. The core of Kachra Co's framework demands and nudges the individual users to recognise their impact potential and "care" about their waste. Becoming a part of the Solve community would make Kachra Co a brand and also change the narrative around conventional waste management.

Kachra Co's framework thrives by closely working and partnering with various stakeholders. We need more mentorship from social entrepreneurs, policymakers possibly from their experience in helping bring meaningful transformation in communities, this will enable us to build solutions which best optimises & caters for the needs of our communities. @Kshitij Purwar

Kachra Co is an enthusiastic team of young and passionate environmentalists, waste champions and leaders who are committed to solving the most pressing problem of our generation.

If possible, we would like mentorship and help from Solver community in designing social behavioural nudges, frameworks that are neutral & easy to adapt by different communities on a global scale.

• We must build deep partnerships with various Public institutions who are the most significant stakeholders in the waste value ecosystem. Policy-making bodies such as the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change, regulatory agencies like State Pollution Control Board established in various states administering waste collection bodies & civic administration.
• Various municipal corporations and leaders in local or state governance who frame important environmental, sanitation policies or undertake major projects.
• Partnerships with leading consumer brands or waste polluters by enabling a chain where the garbage goes back to the brands who can responsibly recycle their waste.
• Partnerships with local Residential Welfare Associations & Community administrations, to establish the Kachra Co framework in multiple societies while fulfilling their unique challenges and needs to implement this framework.
• Partnerships with environmental advocacy groups, change-makers, think tanks and civil society organisations like UN GPWM, WHO, International Solid Waste Association & other National Solid Waste Associations, Gates Foundation etc, to develop interest and spread cognisance about waste and its impact on the environment and communities.
• Partnerships with various local NGO bodies, social enterprises who are involved in collection, recycling and upcycling of dry waste.