ROKA rewinds through a watershed year

From seeing its lane composters on the streets of Kasturba Nagar yield a rich harvest to having a bio-gas generation unit established at a Chennai High School, this residents’ association has had a remarkable 2024

Year 2024 has had a depressingly long list of floods and forest fires across the globe. After all the hand-wringing, one realises it might not be possible to control, let alone change a vast number of things, but one’s backyard is thankfully not among them. One’s backyard lies within one’s sphere of control. And that backyard to us is Kasturba Nagar. And so, as it has in previous years starting 2018, ROKA applied itself to fixing environmental issues in its immediate world. As the segregation in Karturba Nagar had gone up by a notch or two, the next obvious and organic step, by the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, was to figure out the decentralisation of waste management at the community level. Inspired by the SWMRT-Bangalore model of community composting, we set up three lane composters to process organic waste in Kasturba Nagar. With financial support from Resilient Cities Network, The Circulate Initiative and the Ocean Conservancy through our knowledge partners, Okapi Research & Advisory under their Urban Ocean programme, We Segregate was launched.

How can any waste management initiative be allowed to continue without addressing plastic waste? We Segregate project also focusses on the low value and multi-layer plastics that have always been an irritant and a challenge in the whole collection and processing cycle in plastic recycling. Under this project, multiple events involving the residents who were behind its success were conducted throughout 2024.

Rallies were held. A cricket match was organised: on the sidelines of the match, in the dugout area, ROKA was promoting the tenets of waste segregation among spectators. A discussion group consisting of residents sought to work out ways to increase segregation and make it a self-sustaining model. The Urban Ocean Summit happened in June 2024, which had many foreign delegates visiting Kasturba Nagar to understand GCC’s model near zero-waste ward. And now, when we look at the actual impact of this project, we are talking about three cycles of harvest of the compost from the lane composters which equals to 1750 kg of compost distributed to residents and a total of 5250 kg of organic waste locally processed in the year 2024. Low value plastics amounting to 365 kg was diverted and sent for processing through our aggregators Spreco Recycling. GCC and Urbaser Sumeet are looking at emulating ROKA’s model in ward 168, and we have been more than happy to support and guide them into making model wards across Chennai.

Deutsche Welle, DW Eco-India made a documentary on ROKA’s work: 2024 has indeed been an encouraging year.

How can ROKA go without its bi-annual collection drive of 2024, one in the beginning of the year in January and another mid-year, in June or July? Both the drives saw more than 400 people from across Chennai depositing their waste over two days. In January, it was close to 10 MT and in July 7.6 Metric tonnes of recyclable waste was collected and sent for processing.

A new space for Anna Nagar and neighbouring areas to deposit their waste was set up in the month of November at Euphoria World along with Wasted 360.

The rain this year might have affected the greens at the ROKA-run kitchen garden at The Chennai High School in Adyar, but the vegetables compensated for this loss. We harvested 12 kg of vegetables in 2024 and some of these vegetables were harvested by children. Multiple awareness sessions at schools, colleges and corporate houses were a routine affair this year for volunteers at ROKA. In the last couple of events that we were a part of, we tried to stress upon “WASH THE DABBA” campaign along with our SWM and sustainability talks.