Waste Concern

In the early 1990s, Iftekhar Enayetullah and Maqsood Sinha from Bangladesh came up with a unique idea of tackling the hygiene problem in Dhaka. Trash would normally remain littered all across the streets, left to rot, breed mosquitoes, and give rise to many diseases. Iftekhar and Maqsood then started Waste Concern which trained unemployed youth, who would otherwise have taken to petty crimes and a worthless life, to collect garbage from the homes and streets and dump it at the massive Matuail dumping site. At Matuail, they set up a composting plant which converted trash into organic matter and used the biogases released to generate power. The decomposed trash was also utilized as a fertilizer for farmlands. Waste Concern has now entered into a $10 million project sponsored by Netherlands based World Wide Recyclying to scale up the Matuail site and set up similar plants in other parts of the country as well. The Waste Concern website has many interesting papers to read as well. News coverage given to Waste Concern:

Power supply is down in the dumps. Wired News, Aug 17 2005.
Garbage recyclying. The New Nation, Bangladesh, Aug 30 2005.
Waste Concern