Waste Concern
SERVICE
Waste Concern collects organic waste and send it to food processing centers to turn it into compost for horticulture and agriculture.
BUSINESS MODEL
Waste Concern makes money by selling compost such as fertilizers to farmers and enterprises. The firm employs impoverished citizens to collect organic waste. This involves creation of several small-scale enterprises in different neighbourhoods, which acts as part of a de-centralized waste management model. Their operations include house-to-house waste collection, composting of the collected waste by sending them to the composting plants and marketing of the compost and recyclable materials to interested buyers and businesses.
IMPACT
Place: Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia
Scale: 30,000 – 35,000 tons of waste treated per year, reducing carbon emission by 20,000 tons of carbo dioxide per year.
Depth:
- Reduce carbon emissions
- Generate better paid and more hygiene jobs for the impoverished citizens
- Improve the quality of life
- Save landfill area
- Provide organic alternative to fertilizers
- Promotion of recycling activities in the country
ORIGINS
Iftekhar Enayetullah is a Bangladeshi civil/environmental engineer with a master’s degree in waste management. During the 1990s, while still a student, he focused on household waste issues. He decided to put his skills and knowledge to work in Dhaka, where he grew up, which was struggling with the accumulation of household waste.
While working on his thesis, he met Maqsood Sinha, another Bangladesh who shared his convictions and ambitions. Maqsood was doing a research on how to integrate the informal sector waste pickers into the formal sector of waste management.
Together they decided to design a waste treatment facility, and took their idea to the city government and other organizations to implement it. For one year, they have tried to convince them but nobody was listening to them. « At one oint, the government official told us that if we think our idea is so great, why don’t you do it by yourself ?, and that’s when we started in 1994 a project in a small area of Dhaka City« .
WHAT’S NEXT?
- In 2015, they built plants in Cambodia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka
- As waste become less organic, they are planning to extend their services to non-organic waste.
GET INVOLVED !
Follow
Follow how Waste Concern is growing, and attend a talk or training from Waste Concern on waste management.
Contact
You know a place where Waste Concern could have a great impact ? Contact their team as they are expanding in other emerging countries.