Source Reduction + Waste Management + Community Empowerment + Coastal Cleanups + Social Enterprise Models = Closed Loop Economies Protecting the Ocean!
Waste Collection Service (WCS)
Our WCS employs women and youth in the densely populated coastal fishing communities of Vizhinjam, Kottapuram, and Kovalam, Kerala to sort, segregate, and manage pre-washed household and business waste, diverting it from streets, rivers, and the ocean.
Over the past six years, our door-to-door Service (the first of its kind in the state) has grown to:
Service 294 households and 111 businesses, managing waste for over 6,500 people!
Employ 97 local, marginalised women and youth from the communities in which we work.
Collect and properly recycle/upcycle over 5.5 tonnes of waste, otherwise directly dumped into the ocean or burned along river banks.
Remove over two tonnes of soft and hard plastic from polluting the environment.
- Collected over 667,000 individual pieces of plastic from beaches and streets as a part of our ongoing surveys and audits.
Leave No Trace (LNT)
Our LNT project actively engages local businesses and street vendors on the importance of minimising waste, through addressing it directly at source.
Through transitioning supply chains to ‘ocean-friendly’ materials, we eliminate harmful waste items (mainly plastic and polystyrene) before they go to market! We provide 3-month subsidies to local businesses, as well as educational signage and training. They then take over the project themselves, ordering from the new suppliers that we help them to connect with.
To date, Leave No Trace India has:
- Contributed towards a statewide plastics ban in Kerala.
- Eliminated over 2,500,000 single-use plastic items per annum from supply chains through replacing them with ocean-friendly alternatives, such as steel plates, paper straws, areca leaf bowls and cutlery, as well as reusable bottles and cutlery.
- Transitioned 63 businesses to become 100% single-use plastic free!
Our goal: To have over 250 businesses participating by the end of 2024, with an estimated 7,000,000 plastic and polystyrene items removed from circulation every year!
SEE THE PROJECT IN ACTIONBSFL Organic Composting System
Organic food waste poses an enormous environmental and human health risk, not only in our target communities in India, but around the world. Without a proper system in place to dispose of kitchen waste, local communities resort to dumping their waste in drainage systems and local waterways creating a range of human (disease) and environmental (nutrification) health issues. Some even dump it directly into the ocean.
In response, the PCFML India team have developed a system to mitigate this wicked problem. As part of our weekly Waste Collection Service, we collect organic food waste from households and businesses. Using a refined, tested and now certified method harnessing the power of black soldier fly larvae, we’ve been able to turn this enormous problem into a market-based solution! Creating a high value chemical-free compost, sold as fertlisers to nurseries and used in farms in surrounding areas.
Since September 2022, we have:
- Converted >6 tonnes of organic waste into ~2.5 tonnes of organic fertiliser.
- Created livelihood opportunities for marginalised women and youth, with a 30% profit margin on every kg of compost sold.
- Employed and trained local youth to lead the project, creating full time employment.
- Refined the methodology to convert up to 30kg of organic waste per day!
Marine Conservation Centre and
Ocean Innovation Hub
In 2019, we opened our Marine Conservation Centre (MCC) in Kerala, southern India. The Centre serves as a meeting space for stakeholders to discuss, share and learn from one another, as well as providing an office for our local team.
In 2022, we extended the Centre, building our Ocean Innovation Hub (OIH) on its roof, an experiential learning and innovation ecosystem for the local community. This additional workspace focuses on co-creating, testing, and scaling-up sustainable innovations benefiting the marine environment. The Hub acts as an ocean conservation-focused community centre, testing innovative pilot projects and designing action-driven solutions to the most pressing environmental issues. As our MCC and OIH continue to develop, we envision their continued success as orchestrators to connect relevant public bodies, NGOs, businesses and community groups; sharing ideas and challenges, together, in order to move forward towards practical and cutting-edge solutions.
The OIH currently houses our Back Soldier Fly Organic Composting System, Waste Recovery Centre and various innovative plastic press machines and sewing areas, to upcycle waste collected into usable products.
Our Goal: To purchase 450m2 of land in 2024 to build an industrial sized Marine Conservation Centre and Ocean Innovation Hub, enabling us to scale-up our Waste to Wealth program, while creating a multi-use hub for ocean conservation in southern Kerala and beyond!
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