The Seoy awards are back! For those of you who are not familiar with these awards, they are the Oscar equivalent for organisations and ventures that strive towards ensuring a safe environment and do wonders in preventing the environment from depleting further.
Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards (SEOY), a SCHWAB and Jubilant Bhartia Foundation annual event, encourages social entrepreneurs who work in areas as diverse as health, education, job creation, water, clean energy and building identity and entitlements and access to information and technology.
This year, there were several organisations that made the cut and stunned us with their impressive work. We had the opportunity to interact with a four of the finalists who caught our eye. Read on.
best of waste
Daily Dump is a Hyderabad-based venture that focuses on disposing waste in methods that benefit the environment. They have the perfect answers to your ‘If I change the way I throw, will it make a difference?’ questions. “Our composting products help grow the bio-diversity in a landscape and guide us away from burning this important resource,” says Poonam Bir Kasturi, Founder.
“Compost from your kitchen waste has nutrients and micro-organisms that give life and regenerate the place for trees and food to grow. Each of us can make compost at home in our beautiful earthen composters without any foul smell and without spending more than 3 minutes a day!”.
For first timers who are trying their hand at composting, here’s two cents from the founder: “Remember composting is like cooking. Often we try a new dish and get it wrong, but that does not mean we cannot cook are we are bad cooks. Composting is about getting the recipe right for you and your lifestyle”.
Pads@rs3
Goonj, a non-governmental organisation based in New Delhi that has operations in the city concentrates on highlighting clothing as an unaddressed necessity and strives towards rectifying the same. The organisation specialises in turning a city’s waste into currency for rural development and hence helps in averting an environmental disaster.
This social enterprise is often misconstrued as a charity for the poor where one can donate clothes but as pointed out by Anshu Gupta, Founder, you get rid of what you wish to discard, hence it’s an environment friendly means of disposal.
This NGO operates in 22 states across the country and endevours to make clothing a matter of dignity. It is a genesis of a parallel economy which is not just cash based but trash based.Goonj deals with an astonishing 2000 tons of material annually:from clothes to old doors, windows and computers.
It introduces 1500 development activities annually under its flagship initiative ‘Cloth for Work’ through which rural communities receive clothes & other material as a reward for repairing roads, recharging water ponds, building bamboo bridges and digging wells. This helps in creating a safe environment and also enhances economic activities.
Goonj also introduces ventures to create awareness about menstrual sanitation and provide alternatives to sanitary pads that are generally not affordable by many women who resort to alternatives like strips of jute bags, cow dung and blouse pieces.
“We were the first to talk about menstrual awareness. We noticed that there was hardly any research regarding alternatives to sanitary napkins and were appalled by the unhealthy alternatives used by women across the country. We provide ‘Mypads’ which are three metres of cloth that can be used as an alternative and are 100 per cent recyclable and reusable. Also, they are extremely affordable at `3, per pad”, says Anshu.
let there be light
Selco Solar India is an energy access enterprise that creates decentralised renewable energy and works towards creating a safe environment where there is no wastage of natural resources like water on which we heavily depend for the generation of electricity. Their initiatives help in displacing kerosene, diesel and other fuels which we use in our everyday lives that are harmful for the environment.
Till date, the social enterprise has worked with more than 450,000 households in four states and approximately 15,000 institutions like orphanages, residential schools and religious institutions. One of the impressive features involves entailing the help of the people whose lives they strive to enhance: the Light for Education project for example is an initiative where solar panels are installed in schools and each child is given a solar lamp which can be charged only with the help of these solar panels.
This ensures that children come to school and learn and if they don’t there’s no light at home. This initiative which was an exemplary success involved 30,000 children in Karnataka.
“SELCO focuses on innovations and interventions that are socially, financially and environmentally sustainable; thus, can be replicated which leads to causing a larger impact”, says Harish Hande, Founder of the enterprise.
zero liquid wastage
Water Health Pvt. Ltd. is a Hyderabad-based company which specialises in water treatment and purification through environment friendly methods. Vikas Shah who started this initiative establishes water treatment plants in areas where there is a dire need for clean and safe water.
“30,000 litres of water are treated annually in our plants through six stages of purification which are not energy intensive and use a nominal amount of energy”, says Vikas Shah.
The land and infrastructure for these plants are provided by the government and the company has several plants set up across the Indian subcontinent and West Africa til date. Similar to how carbon credits are given to companies which mold their operations to reduce carbon emissions, Water Benefit Certificates are given to companies which treat water depending on how negligible the amount of fossil fuel they use in their everyday operations is.
Water Health’s Karntaka plant was awarded with such a certificate. It is also proud to call itself a ‘Zero liquid wastage company’ as leftover water is used for gardening or is percolated into the aquifers.
“80% of the people are hospitalised due to water borne diseases caused due to micro biological contamination of water: 90% purify water mostly by boiling water which increases the of fossil fuel which harms the environment. We use methods that don’t require fossil fuels”, says Vikas Shah. The company presently caters to 8 million people and endevours to reach at least a 100 million by 2020.