‘Vermin-Composting’ up for ‘Green Oscars’?
Caught an interesting article recently about two Indian waste management projects that have been nominated and shortlisted (along with 8 other nominees) for Ashden Awards, also know as the “Green Oscars”.
Apparently Al Gore will be presenting the awards to the winners at the June 21st ceremony, taking place at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
Here is an exerpt:
Biotech from Kerala and SKG Sangha from Karnataka will compete with contenders from Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Lao PDR, Nepal, Peru, Philippines and Tanzania for the five awards and the prize money earmarked to help project expansion and replication in other communities both locally and nation wide.
Biotech has been selected for tackling the problem of dumping food waste in the streets of Kerala through the installation of biogas plants that use the waste to produce gas for cooking and, in some cases, electricity for lighting.
Biotech has built and installed an impressive 12,000 domestic plants (160 of which also use human waste from latrines to avoid contamination of ground water), 220 institutional plants and 17 municipal plants that use waste from markets to power generations.
SKG Sangha has been selected for radically improving the lives of thousands of rural families in Karnataka by supplying them with both dung based biogas plants for cooking and a specially designed unit that turns the slurry from the biogas plant into high quality fertilizer.
The units supplied by SKG Sangha produce fertilizer simply by combing the slurry with straw and leaves and then adding worms which re-digest the mixture to produce vermin-compost.
This vermi-compost improves the yields of family crops and women can earn as much from selling half the vermin-compost they produce as the household earns from selling the crops they grow. Since 1993, SKG Sangha has installed over 43,000 biogas plants in Karnataka alone.
I guess ‘vermi-composting’ and ‘vermin-composting’ are interchangeable terms!
Regardless, both projects sound great, and I really hope the worms go home with some hardware! 
Be sure to check out the full article to learn more about the Ashden Awards and some of the other nominees: Two Indian projects may win ‘Green Oscars’
Technorati Tags: green oscars, ashden awards, al gore, vermicomposting, vermi-composting, vermin-composting, biogas, waste management
Written by Bentley on May 29th, 2007 with
no comments.
Read more articles on Waste Management.
- [+] Digg: Feature this article
- [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
- [+] Furl: Bookmark this article
