The market for Waste Management is rapidly evolving with a lot of new startups like Ekobarn, small businesses and individuals taking up on themselves to solve our country’s waste problem. The main factor driving this industry is the fact that we are running out of space to fill our garbage! We see waste lying around us wherever we go, and our landfills are filled up to the brim in all major cities. Individuals and government bodies have become aware of the situation, and they are demanding unconventional waste management systems to tackle their garbage problem at source. Ekobarn is focused on tackling the inefficiencies in current waste management techniques with an aim to help people reduce their individual footprint on the environment.
Co-Founder and Director of Sales & Marketing, Sujatha says,” Almost 50-70 percent of the costs involved in waste management go primarily into transportation of waste. Across the nation, municipalities are striving to find solutions that reduce waste and treat the waste produced at source. Where there are incentives for corporates to incorporate efficient waste management techniques, municipal bodies are also promoting behavior building campaigns for end-consumers towards self-treating of waste and reducing the amount of waste that exits households”.
Pioneering Household Waste Management
Educating consumers to build new wet waste management household habits is the primary challenge that companies in this industry face. Ekobarn looks to handle this through the three tenets of Education, Enablement and Empowerment. Sujatha mentions, “Customers expect waste to be taken off their hands and do not understand the value of composting it at home.
Convincing customers to manage waste themselves is tough, even if the process is simple and affordable. Very little time and monetary investment is required in adoption of waste management technologies, and we empower consumers to look at kitchen waste differently by helping them upcycle it to a product of far greater value. We also help large bulk generators to realize economic value by guiding them to government schemes that incentivize on-site composting".
Journey So Far & Future Plans
Ekobarn develops engineered bins and bulk composters to help people convert their kitchen waste into high-quality compost. These composters are economical, high-quality, easy to use, and are used to convert kitchen waste to compost within eight weeks. It includes our proprietary compost culture, which is a mixture of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that help decompose food, enabling composting that is smell-free and pest free. Our customers can use these within their own households or within a large community.
Ekobarn in its first year of operations helped divert more than 10 tonnes of wet waste from landfills and have replaced more than 100 kg of plaster-of-par-is with compost by introducing compost-based Ganesha. The firm also conducted various workshops for all age ranges to increase awareness and adoption for at-home composting solutions. We now deliver our home composters all over India and have received amazing response from our users regarding ease of usage and superiority of composting technology from Ekobarn.
Sujatha concludes, “We are now expanding into bulk or community composting solutions. We have received great interest from the market with our limited outreach for bulk composting and are actively building a team to establish Ekobarn as a leading bulk composter within Maharashtra within the next two quarters and all over the country over the course of the next two years. We have recently installed a no smell, no hassle community composter in Mumbai which will be diverting another 9.7 tons of wet waste in the coming months. Ekobarn is born out of the passion to change the way the world thinks of waste. Together we can make the world a better place than what we inherited! Remember, Convenience at the expense of the planet is not convenience at all.”
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