In 2016, when the Deonar dumping ground caught fire, Divya Ravichandran troubled by the newspaper headlines recalls asking herself, "Where does my household waste go and why is it on fire?" Her visits to the Deonar and Kanjurmarg dumping grounds were eye-openers to the city's pressing waste management problem.

Irked by this, she decided to channel her eco-anxiety for positive impact by taking charge of the waste she was generating and adopting a zero-waste lifestyle. "My family and I started by segregating our waste into dry and wet bins. All the collected dry waste at the end of the month would then be dropped off at the different dry waste collection centres in the city for recycling. What amazed me what that 60 per cent of the household waste that we were generating was biodegradable kitchen waste," she shares.