Talk Sustainability with Sandeep Sandeep Raghuwanshi

Access to menstrual hygiene is of critical importance to health and well being of women. Menstrual and other personal hygiene waste constitute around 6% of India’s total municipal waste. The biomedical nature of this waste, unsafe disposal practices and lack of segregation at source creates hazards and challenges in waste management - especially since manual handling remains widespread. Any discussion on increased access to hygiene has to discuss the waste management. But given shame associated with the subject, focusing on waste risks further stigmatising the topic. On this subject, we spoke with Smita Kulkarni, Co-founder of Stonesoup, a bangalore based startup who is working towards creating awareness about sustainable menstruation.

A significant amount of textile is wasted in the garment finishing factories. Traditionally, this has been sold as mixed scrap to the unorganised sector that then downcycles it for lower end or finds alternative uses. While this keeps material in use longer, it continues or even worsens the social and environmental challenges of the industry. But it doesn’t have to be this way only. We spoke with Kriti Tula, a fashion designer and co-owner of DOODLAGE - a label that upcycles this waste into high street designs and products. 

Fashion as an Industry is notorious for being resource inefficient and generating significant amount of waste. Clothing is a basic need but fashion is more than just need to cover bodies. Sales process is a complex cocktail of trends, pricing, colors, seasons, distribution channels and much more. This results in significant leakage which creates waste not only of materials but also all the resources and labor that has gone into it. To help us walk through the fashion value chain and identify the hotspots for waste generation, we spoke with Anju Singhal Shetty who has long years of experience working with multiple leading brands in India.

Anywhere between 10% to 25% of all Fabric intended for clothing, ends up as waste on the cutting room floor. Besides fabric, there are several other items also that get wasted in process of finishing garments. in this episode, we spoke with Mr. Prashant Mithare, a veteran of over 25 years of experience in managing Garment and Textile Production factories to get a clearer picture of what kind of material waste is generated on a factory floor and what can be done to reduce or avoid this wastage all together

Innovations in multilayer packaging have allowed extended shelf lives and other protective functionalities to a range of products including food and clothing. However composite materials cannot be recycled easily with mechanical processes. In this episode, we spoke with Ms. Monisha Narke - Founder and CEO, RUR Greenlife to investigate what happens to this protective mulit-layered packaging at the end of its product lifecycle.

Weddings are grand celebrations in India, with music, dancing, ornate decoration and lots and lots of food. With such a large party and thousands of guests in attendance, wastage is inevitable, and weddings are the largest contributors of event industry waste in India. In this episode, we spoke with Trishant Sidhwani - Partner at Dreamzkraft to understand what can be done so that once the party is over, weddings leave footprints of memory only and not of waste.