Do you remember the kabadiwala turning up outside your house, a soft honking sound preceding his arrival? You’d rush up to his cart ready to hand out your contribution of household recyclable waste - papers, old notebooks, tattered comic books - in return for a few rupees, while your mum would handle the more ‘delicate’ items like glass and plastic bottles. In a modern urban home, though, with the busy lives of its inhabitants, it’s easy for waste to accumulate like an infestation that most want to dispose of as quickly as possible, without the hassle of bargaining with your local kabadiwala. While easy to do, this results in the improper disposal of waste that goes on to have more serious implications for the environment. In an attempt to rectify this, and make our lives a lot simpler, an app called Pom Pom has been launched in New Delhi and the NCR region.

Developed by Deepak Sethi, 37, and Kishore Thakur, 57, Pom Pom acts like your modern day kabadiwala, complete with a name reminiscent of the sound that used to alert you to his presence. How it works: you contact the Pom Pom team through their app and they show up at your doorstep at a predetermined time. They segregate your waste materials and weigh your recyclables on electronic scales that help you get the highest, most accurate amount possible for your contribution. The recyclables are then supplied in bulk to industries that use them to make new products. Getting paid, albeit scantily, in exchange for something of no value to you is a great incentive to segregate, along with the knowledge that you’re doing your bit to keep your city clean. Pom Pom banks on this as they strive to reach 1,00,000 people with their initiative and solve their waste management problems.

Segregation of waste, especially household generated waste, is key. New Delhi has a troublingly high level of waste generation and its improper disposal has left a mix of garbage and recyclable products to pile up in our overflowing landfills. The city generates about approximately 10,000 tons of waste per day, almost half of which is dumped in landfills. The remaining half is processed in machines that convert it to energy. For the processing to work properly though, only waste with a high calorific value, i.e. non-biodegradable, non-recyclable waste, must be fed into the machines. When not segregated, all kinds of waste makes its way to these plants and undermining the entire process.

The only way to combat this is to segregate at the source, which is exactly what Pom Pom is designed to do. Till now, the focus of waste management in the capital has been on disposal. Keeping the streets clean by dropping the trash in alotted cans, and the like. Now, however, the time has come for the city to up its game and responsibly dispose of their waste by first segregating it into recyclable, non-recyclable, degradable, and non-degradable. The landfills that have become little more than toxic ponds of fuming, rotting trash can then be converted to processing centres, a move that will eventually help lift the city’s processing capabilities.

For now, Pom Pom is focusing exclusively on the New Delhi-NCR region. “We aim to consolidate our position in the waste recycling space and will only look at expanding to newer zones and cities once our service both at the customer end and at the collection site becomes seamless,” Kishore told Your Story. While Pom Pom is not the only app of its kind its many features and exceptionally seamless process - from waste segregation to getting paid right on your doorstep - definitely make it stand out. Here’s hoping socially responsible apps like Pom Pom can continue to educate people on how imperative segregation and recycling is to living a clean, environmentally-conscious life.

Feature image via The Better India.