This 23 Year-Old Bangalore Girl’s Invention Segregates Waste Within Minutes!

Failure on the part of the authorities to deal with waste piled up near her college in Bangalore led Nivedha R.M. to take matters into her own hands and develop TrashBot, an automated waste segregator that’s tackling India’s trash problem head on!

While in her third year of chemical engineering at R V College of Engineering, Nivedha and her friends first made the headlines for clearing up waste that had been piled up in a lane near their college. Less than a week later, the garbage was back. When she questioned the authorities about their lack of action, she was told that there was no use in clearing the area, because people did not segregate their waste. With wet waste like leftover food being dumped in the same place as dry waste like plastic bottles, the only options were to let it be or burn it all, which comes with its own set of health hazards. That was when Nivedha set out to find a more permanent solution to this problem, reading up on waste segregation and conceptualising her first waste segregation system in 2016. 

After her first prototype showed promise while dealing with 1 kg of waste, Nivedha drew up designs to scale it up to a 50 kg/hr model, and even came up with her own company, TrashCon. A lack of funds led her to apply for Elevate 100, a flagship programme by the Karnataka Government that provides funding for 100 innovative startups. The resulting model was installed in an apartment complex with 150 homes, giving her valuable insights into issues like overloading, and how unskilled labour could affect the efficiency of the machine. However, with India generating about 68 million tonnes of waste in a year (most of it unsorted), this was too small a scale for her to properly implement her plans.

Soon enough, she had designed a machine with a capacity of processing 250 kg of waste, and even secured permission to install a model at a dump yard. Even though it struggled to cope with the volume of trash it was processing, this was when Nivedha gained the support of similarly passionate individuals who joined the TrashCon team. Among those was Saurabh Jain, a CA and an electronics engineer who quit his job and joined up full time to help her understand technical aspects that she was struggling with. In a few months, the machine was fully operational, and capable of dealing with whatever trash was thrown at it.

The current version of the machine has been operating at a site in Basavanagudi for about six months, having segregated about 65,000 pounds of waste with an astounding efficiency rate of up to 99.6%. Once separated, biodegradable waste can be recycled into biogas or manure, while the non-biodegradable waste can be used as refuse-derived fuel (RDF), or oil. The waste segregator is currently available in four capacities - 500 kg, two tonnes, five tonnes and ten tonnes.The team’s plan is to set up TrashBots across the country, each servicing about 10,000 homes within a radius of about three to four miles, and bypassing the need for unsightly and hazardous landfills. Thanks to their efforts, sustainable waste management practices might soon be in place all over India, leading to the country becoming much cleaner!

Source: TrashCon, The Better India, The Christian Science Monitor