Vadaavaran Collective: Vadodara’s student-led initiative for a better environment

A confluence of the Banyan City (Vad) and the environment that it sustains (Vatavaran) – Vadaavaran Collective is a student-led organization that, through its own distinctive methods, helps in the upcycling of food waste in Vadodara.

A menace in society, food waste has given rise to landfills and has substantially increased carbon emissions. From its inception in October 2020, the organization claimed that it had helped in turning down the amount of carbon emissions in the city by five tonnes until last month. The project includes collecting food waste, generating compost, and later using the compost as manure in gardening activities or for everyday purposes.

Gigatonne Challenge, a global initiative to address climate change, prompted college students and young professionals from Vadodara to kickstart this project. While the project initially had 10-12 core members, the collective grew to approximately 50 volunteers over time.

In its infancy, the initiative was started by collecting food waste from restaurants. However, with the doom of the second wave and the subsequent lockdown, collecting waste from restaurants became unfeasible. Rajasi Rastogi, a social designer and one of the founding members, said, “To combat this issue, we started collecting waste from societies and households. We created WhatsApp groups with house owners, homemakers and collaborated with societies to gather waste.” “We dealt with 500 kgs of waste when we started out. Now, we deal with roughly 2000-2500 kgs of food waste,” she added.

With the onset of the pandemic and COVID-related restrictions, the collective started conducting online awareness sessions to educate the young regarding the implications of harmful emissions. Apart from the online sessions, Rajasi said, “We really want to promote this in different localities as an individual activity. People can reach out to us, take guidelines on the process of converting waste into compost, and replenish their microhabitats.” As a gesture of goodwill, the Baroda Industrial Development Corporation also helped Vadaavaran with a plot of land to conduct their activities.

Based in Vadodara, Vadaavaran has also been selected for the Government of India’s Swachhta Saarthi Fellowship. The seemingly mammoth task of converting waste into a utility product only took a group of motivated students, an idea, and a concern for the environment to bring fruition, and, in roughly seven months, the bunch of young professionals has made Vadodara a better place to breathe in.