Garden Waste Composting Project at Roseland Residency, Pimple Saudagar, Pune

Roseland Residency is proud to say

“Not a Single leaf is burnt and wasted”.

Sidharth Naik (Roseland Residency, Pimple Saudagar)

We started composting of garden waste in Jan-16 at Roseland Residency, Pimple Saudagar. Our society has around 7 gardens and our campus generates lot of leaf and other garden waste on a daily basis. Around 50 kg leaf waste is generated every day. Within a month, sometime in end of Feb, we got hit by one of the severe water crisis in our society till date and this project was on back burner without much attention given to its output. We were still dumping the garden waste in the composting area.

In Jan-17, we visited Manmohan Society in Kothrud to see their garden waste composting project which they had mastered and have been successfully running for last many years under the guidance of Mrs Anuradha Ganu. This was arranged as part of the demo sessions by Brown Leaf initiative.

During this visit we actually found that method employed by us at Roseland Residency was similar to what Manmohan society was doing but ours had major gaps. We also took our gardener along with us for this visit so that he will also get a first-hand experience. After this visit we found that we had below major gaps:

1. Leaf waste and bigger garden waste like trimmings of trees, branches, palm leaves were mixed and put into the composting pile.

2. Our composting area was not well organized.

3. Composting project was neglected and not monitored

• After the visit, below steps were implemented at Roseland Residency:

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• We harvested all compost which was ignored (from last year). We could harvest almost 1,000 kg of good quality compost which was lying there unused and fed it back to nature in our gardens.

• Separated bigger garden waste and only leaves to be dumped in the composting pile.

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• Created composting areas so that composting is done in an organized fashion. We got compartments made.

• Created a steady state of water supply by diverting our STP treated water.

• Weekly monitoring by management team.

• Connected with INORA to ensure steady supply of compost culture.

• Gardening staff trained for the process to be followed and motivated through rewards.

• Installed few leaf composters in each garden

Roseland Residency would like to appreciate the help provided by Brown Leaf team and Special thanks to Ms Aditi Deodhar, Mrs Anuradha Ganu for their inspiration and help to get our garden waste composting project revived and getting it back on track.