On October 10, in Oslo, the Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, was holding a red envelope that promised a cash prize of Rs 40 lakh to the winner of the 2019 Impact Maker Awards. Thirty-five short-listed participants waited.
“It was all surreal, like a dream,” says Nivedha RM, founder of the Bengaluru- based Trashcon.
Her firm was recognised for providing unconventional solutions to one of the world’s toughest problems—segregating biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste. At the Basavangudi Municipal Corporation ward in Bengaluru, Nivedha’s invention—the Trash- Bot—is doing its job of making the city clean one load at a time.
A worker dumps garbage at the entry area of the machine and the waste moves forward and enters a magnetic chute.
This removes the screws and nuts. Then it goes onto the second level. An arm pushes all the metals to one side. The rest of the waste moves to a loading conveyor.
The food packets are cut into several slits. The load then hits a blast of air and the biodegradable waste falls, and the plastic and other materials are carried into another chamber.
“That’s how the segregation takes place,” says the young entrepreneur. The biodegradable waste is converted to compost, biogas or biofuel.
The non-biodegradable waste is converted into boards—another technology invented by Nivedha and her team.
“It looks like plywood but is stronger, compact, water-resistant, as well as termite- and rot-resistant. And it is available at one-fifth the price of plywood,” she says. While studying at the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering, Nivedha would notice that the streets were always strewn with garbage.
“I thought that instead of doing rallies or campaigns, I should clear the stretch,” she says, and so she did.
But the mound of waste was back in a week. Not one to give up, Nivedha decided to make a machine that would automatically segregate the waste. Her mother put in Rs 2 lakh. Nivedha applied for a grant to Elevate 100, an initiative of the Karnataka State Department of Information Technology and Biotechnology, and received Rs 10 lakh. With the help of friend Saurabh Jain, a chemical engineer as well as a chartered accountant and now cofounder of Trashcon, the TrashBot was made. And the rest, as they say, is history.