Greetings Poonam,

Just wanted to check-in and send along some photos of what I have been working with here. This design has proven functional and affordable, yet admittedly it lacks the visual beauty of what you have there. I made three of these and gave two away to other families to participate in "the project" - I gave credit to Daily Dump as the model and for using the concepts and labeled my buckets simply as "Urn Your Greens". I'm about 45 days in on mine and it seems to be going well. I've heard no complaints from the others so far.

Another reason that I wanted to contact at this point was to see if you think anyone on your email list would be interested in sharing their experiences and or networking their ideas? (I saw that you had quite a few names on your last email dispatch about your trip to the States).

Anyway no immediate plans to leave my day job to become the compost king, but I'm definitely interested in the potential of expanding this in the future so... the more the merrier!

Regards from Florida,
Bob Bennett

Bob has gone one step further since then – see his website www.urnyourgreens.com While his initial products use plastic he is also exploring the possibility of more eco-friendly materials. We are very excited about how this will evolve. It’s a great example of how the open-source south-north dialogue can happen.

Nirmal Sethia and Jeff Smith invited me to talk for 5 minutes about the Daily Dump Project at the ICSID IDSA conference Connecting Congress at San Francisco 17-20th October 2007. They were presenting a paper on Sustainable Design and Business and had used the Daily Dump project as an example.

Daily Dump now has a clone in the UAE thanks to Sandhya. Sandhya is a very avid eco-citizen. She sent us this mail with the pictures!

Dear Poonam,

How are you doing? Things going along fine here after a real hot summer. Composting going well. Have got 20 more pots done. Two more ladies inspired to try out home composting. They will start this week.

I am sending you pictures in a PDF file attached. Eager for you to see and give me a feedback...

Love
Sandhya

Sandhya Prakash
PO Box: 215918, Jumeriah-Dubai
United Arab Emirates
+97150.5512481

In a central square in Copenhagen the terracotta composter holds its own in a bubble! Poonam went to attend the INDEX awards function and while the Daily Dump did not win in its Home category, It got a lot of good reviews - especially from citizens and the Mayor of Copenhagen!

We have got a lot of web interest recently. This has led to lots of inquiries from all over the world. People and eco-companies want to clone this business.

Perhaps we will soon see this product in modified forms sprouting all over! Our Google Analytics site tells us that the daily dump site has been visited by most countries. We began tracking our pages on July 26th and so far as of today have had 3521 visitors!

Daily Dump got prime "real estate" space in the Deccan Herald Realty supplement. It's nice to see the product reach this section, because it locates it in the context of home, builders, urban issues. Lots of friends called and congratulated us, and we thought yes, this is good, but the team would open a bottle of champagne once we are able to have a builder equip a block of flats with a mechanical composter or terracotta composter as a standard fixture. A composter should be like your commode or wash basin - you can choose the model but each flat or home should be incomplete without it!!!

So wish us well and help us make that happen in India.

Wow! We are now featured in World Changing. A student sent me this bit of information. This site is a great place to be part of. It encourages projects like us and we hope that the product development aspect of this project will receive an impetus.

Navneeth is now the proud Daily Dump Clone in Chennai. A famous landscape designer in her own right she has begun this enterprise and has 100 kambhas waiting to be sold

Her contact details are below.
In case you know anyone in Chennai who wants a composter please direct them to Navneeth.

Navneeth Raghavan
Aarthi Apartments
4 Haddows Road,
1st Street
Chennai 600 006
Phone: 28260780
Email: rags@satyam.net.in
Mobile: 9840082607

We had our second open house and invited our first customer of the last year to inaugurate this one. Margret Nakra who is an avid composter and harvests a lot of compost every month graced the occasion.

We had screening of Al Gore's"Inconvenient Truth" on two days and a talk by Dr Ravi Chellam from Atree on Lions.

We had a great Expert Think Tank session on day 2. This session had many of Bangalore's experts in ecology and involved customers give advice to Daily Dump on how it should grow as a project.

We had the benefit of their vision and we have compiled this into a "To do List" for the next year. Our efforts with the design of the mechanical composter was shared with this group.

Daily Dump thanks S Vishwanath, Anjana Iyer, Banny Banerjee, M P Ranjan, Gopinath, Jayawanth Bharadwaj, Wilma, R, Sheela Ladha, Vasu, Meera, Ramkumar, Giridhar Pai, Rustam Vania, Margret Nakra, Deepak Nakra, for their valuable inputs.

Daily Dump also honored three great heros at this event. Jayawanth Bharadwaj, Vasu are customers who have been daily dump evangelists and sold a whole lot of composters to friends, neighbours and family. They have been a great source of inspiration to the team and continue being our advisors. Another Daily Dump evangelist is M P Ranjan who has taken this idea to many forums in the world.

Thanks also to Vish, Radha and others on the team.

Bangalore has so many of these fruit and vegetable co-operative outlets. Each of these generate valuable organic waste that can be converted into compost. We began showing what can be done by placing 6 units free of cost outside the Hopcoms near our office. We knew we could expect some to get stolen or damaged. Sure enough on the third night – two pots disappeared! But we will continue till we establish to Mahadevappa (the owner of this outlet) that he can actually sell done compost! Watch this experiment, we are very excited by it.

Daily dump composters are part of a permanent exhibit in Chennai and are reported in the newspaper of Exnora International. 20, Giriappa Road, T Nagar, Chennai 600 017

From: Mette Sindet Hansen [mailto:msh@indexaward.dk]
Sent: 28 February 2007 21:40
Subject: INDEX: AWARD 2007

CONGRATULATIONS! We have the great pleasure to inform you that your design has been selected as one of the top nominated designs for the INDEX: AWARD 2007.

Read the entire article online

We begin seeking feedback from all our customers during the first year to get an idea on how the project is actually doing on the ground. We will compile the data and put it up at the end of May 2007. Prashant (an old student) and Radha (an architect who has joined Daily Dump on a part time basis) have been calling and have got many interesting anecdotes that they have documented. One customer got a visit from us with a bag of dried leaves as a present, since she mentioned she was having problems sourcing dried leaves where she lived. Vish, (www.oacindia.com) a customer and now volunteer has taken it on himself to steer Daily Dump into new markets while mentoring the project!

Get in touch with him if you want to know what it feels like to be a Daily Dump volunteer:

Vishwanath Gopalakrishnan - gvish@oacindia.com

We begin getting inquires from overseas requesting for design drawings and operating instructions.

From: Tracy Wise [mailto:tracyw@iomsrilanka.org]
Sent: 20 February 2007 10:12
To: pbkasturi@usermail.com
Subject: Daily Dump - design details?

Hello,
I work with IOM, the International Organization for Migration, in Vavuniya, Sri Lanka. We work on providing reintegration support to returned refugees and their host communities. One aspect of our project is solid waste management. While trying to find alternative, low cost compost designs for urban areas, I came across mentions of your daily dump. I am very interested in this as a possibility for our project. I also found mention that the designs would be available online, but have been unable to find them as of yet. Unfortunately, we do not have time or resources to go through the whole design process, re-doing all the work that you have already done. Is it possible to email, fax, or mail the specifications? We would of course be mentioning the origin of the design in our reports to the donors, UNICEF and AusAID, as well as to the local government.

Regards,
Tracy Wise

We were invited by the "Children's Movement for Civic Awareness" to participate in the annual civic fair and exhibition at St.Joseph’s Indian High School. It was a real education to see the perceptions school children have of ideas like "ecology", "organic", "waste", "compost". It strengthened our resolve to work more in the area of projects for young people that moved from rudimentary to sophisticated understandings.

The government of Karnataka was very supportive – they supported the Daily Dump products by exempting the VAT since these products are made of terracotta. This will help get the roadside shops sell composters without any problems.

We have spoken at many layouts and associations. The Rainbow Drive Layout on Sarjapur road has many customers who are how composting at home. The IISc staff quarters has a lot of converts. We have been invited to Rotary Clubs and Schools to give talks about the product and explain the workings of home composting.