Recycling Piety: Responsibilizing Religious Consumers

Rapid urbanization has obviously put large pressures on our urban centers, resulting from overpopulation and attendant failure of urban infrastructure. Further, availability of providing citizens with basic amenities also emerge as a key challenge for the municipal authorities.
A unique problem that plagues many Indian cities is the problem associated with religious waste. These originate from the tons of flowers, incense sticks, milk, curd that are offered to the deities in temples and other religious centers, which decay quickly and add to the waste that requires a large effort from the local municipal agencies. However, the religious sentiments associated with these offerings also make it imperative that these be disposed in a befitting manner. Traditionally, these were disposed of indiscriminately in rivers and lakes, or large water bodies, which resulted in large scale contamination of groundwater, or sources of potable water.
For this research, we will focusing on green entrepreneur based out of the Indian city of Hyderabad, whose firm collects these religious waste (largely flowers and floral ornaments) from temples and produces incense sticks, soaps, floor cleaning liquids from the processing of these waste. We will also extend our search to cover other green entrepreneurs who are sharing this space in other cities, in order to find complementary linkages."