Zero waste: Making sure nothing goes to waste at home

Gurugram's Monika Khanna Gulati takes pride in living a minimalist lifestyle and helping cultivate a rich biodiversity in her surroundings

Monika Khanna Gulati, a practicing graphic designer and an educator living in Gurugram’s Nirvana Country, takes pride in living a minimalist lifestyle and helping cultivate a rich biodiversity in her surroundings -- a healthy population of ladybugs, purple sunbirds nesting in her home garden and little waste leaving the household.

Monika Khanna Gulati, Gurugram-based educator.

“When we unsettle environment, we also damage our living conditions,” Gulati says. A zero-waste evangelist, she has been working on waste minimisation and composting initiatives. “The house has little destination for everything that can be utilised or reused and it works like clockwork. We don’t set aside time for this and we don’t have to compromise on work,” she says.

Nothing in the household goes to waste--it is either reused, upcycled or utilised sustainably in the community. Gulati, the founder of the ‘NCR waste matters’ initiative, a platform for bringing together waste-management experts and professional agencies, composting at individual, home, and community level, says her own neighbourhood now produces around 1.5 tonnes of compost every month, managing its entire wet organic waste in-house.