Bangalore produces around 7,000 tonnes of waste a day, roughly 3,000 tonnes of that is wet waste. All of it has to be collected, segregated, and processed every single day. A lot of it still ends up badly treated or in a landfill.

We got to know the Hasiru Dala Innovations team a few years ago. They’ve spent years doing the thankless part of this, collecting and segregating waste at scale. But wet waste has remained a problem. Dry waste has buyers. Wet waste goes bad too quickly to store, and composting it usually loses money.

Carbon Masters takes that wet waste and turns it into biogas you can cook with. More importantly, they’ve made a business out of it.

Put the two together, and it’s fairly obvious. Hasiru Dala has the waste and knows how to sort it. Carbon Masters knows how to generate economic value out of it by generating biogas and organic manure.

This problem goes beyond Bengaluru’s garbage. India imports about 60% of our LPG and half our natural gas. Turning our own waste into fuel is about as self-reliant as it gets.

We need more people working on hard problems like this. That’s also why we’ve backed both Hasiru Dala Innovations and Carbon Masters through Rainmatter.

We spent some time at their Harohalli plant to understand how it all fits together for our latest Rainmatter Original. If you’ve ever wondered where the waste from our homes actually goes, this is worth a watch.🙂

Watch the episode.

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