Meet the Man Who Quit His Job in London To Recycle 6 Lakh Litres of Greywater in Indian Schools
Prashant Sharma quit his job in London to launch a non-profit organisation called ‘Positive Action for Child and Earth Foundation’. Through this, he provides greywater recycling solutions to schools, colleges and other organisations.
One of the biggest nightmares for the residents of Chennai was on 19 June 2019 when the city was out of drinking water. Called ‘Day Zero’, it was one of the worst water crises faced by the city as the municipality ran out of drinking water.
Around the same time, Prashant Sharma, a programme manager in an IT firm, happened to be visiting his in-laws in Chennai with his wife and two-year-old son. The worried father had to scramble for water for over a week to provide for his toddler’s needs.
He recalls how people rushed towards the water tankers and paid extra to ensure that they received it. However, the water they got was often salty and unclean which needed to be boiled several times before being used.
This incident left him spending days in search of solutions.
“I wondered about what we could do. Since water is a finite resource, how could we make its usage more circular?” Prashant shares with The Better India.
The solution the 50-year-old found was using greywater, which is basically domestic wastewater from wash basins, washing machines, showers, kitchens.
A DowntoEarth report estimates that India generates about 31 billion litres of greywater everyday.
The sustainability enthusiast found that recycling greywater in schools, colleges, homes could be a viable solution that could help us tide over the water crisis in the future. This recycled greywater can be used to recharge groundwater, water plants, clean, in landscaping and gardening, in the toilet flush and more.
With his idea in place, Prashant quit his corporate career and founded a non-profit called ‘Positive Action For Child And Earth Foundation’ in 2022. Through a sustainable and natural recycling method developed by Prashant, he claims that the schools in Delhi and Uttarakhand are today saving six lakh litres of freshwater yearly.
‘We can’t afford to be passive spectators anymore’
While Prashant was earlier working in IT companies in India and London, his tryst with sustainability and waste water recycling started in 2010. He became actively involved in sustainability initiatives in his borough (local authorities).
He was the designated sustainability champion of the area, where he conducted awareness and waste segregation campaigns, recycling initiatives, and taught people how to compost, among other activities.
He continued this work along with his job in different companies including Shell, IBM, Accenture, British Petroleum.
The 2019 water crisis and his bad experience made him start looking for sustainable solutions. At the same time, he also realised that corporate life wasn’t for him anymore.
“Working for a paycheck wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. When you reach a certain level of financial security, you should consider giving back to society, and for me, that was greywater recycling,” Prashant shares.
He also shares that climate change has reached a stage where “we can now no longer afford to be a passive spectator to the carnage being done to our environment.”
“Water is obviously one of the biggest problems in the world today. I saw firsthand in Chennai how desperate people can become when there’s no water. I also visited a lot of villages after 2019 and looked at ways I could contribute. I found my calling in water conservation,” shares Prashant.
During his research, he found that greywater was something that could be recycled.
“If 100 litres of water are being released, almost 70 litres of that is greywater, i.e. non-faecal water with minimum impurities, which can be easily recycled. Urban India generates about 70 litres of greywater per person per day, but in almost 100 percent cases, this greywater is simply mixed with sewage,” he adds.
Usually what happens is that this greywater gets mixed with the sewage water and is sent to Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) or just discharged openly, impacting livelihoods, crop productivity and an increase in vector borne diseases, explains Prashant.
He adds that STPs are one of the most polluting industries, “consuming about three percent of the world’s energy.” Therefore, recycling greywater near its source is sustainable and a possible solution to solve the global water crisis. The DownToEarth report also states that “reuse of greywater for toilet flushing alone can reduce the freshwater demand by 10-20 percent.”
Greywater recycling is also very simple, starting with using cooking water to water plants, and for flushing. It also requires no electricity or chemicals. It treats the waste water at source, making it a decentralised solution.
Once the idea was set, Prashant worked on a nature-based solution to recycle greywater- Constructed Wetlands (CW), which are built using natural filter materials like activated charcoal, stone, grit, sand.
Constructed wetlands are man-made wastewater recycling systems which resemble natural wetlands in treatment.
“Wastewater is recycled through natural processes involving soil, vegetation, and microbial communities. We use natural filter materials and plants that are easy to integrate
aesthetically into the existing buildings and are scalable,” explains Prashant.
He first targeted schools as that is a place where a lot of greywater is generated and there is enough space to recycle it.
“Each child generates about 8 litres of greywater every day in a school. So consider a school with 4,000 students, which is an opportunity to recycle 16,000 litres of water per day and create a positive impact,” he adds.
How it works
The basic idea is to divert the greywater before it mixes with the sewage water so that it can be recycled.
The first step that Prashant takes is to conduct a greywater audit to calculate the amount of water that the school or organisation generates per day. The second step is to identify the easiest way and place where this water can be recycled. The third and final step is to design, build, test and operationalise the solution.
“Since schools have a lot of floors and many bathrooms, we need to find a source where we can recycle the water easily without much civil work and expenditure,” he adds.
In Prashant’s model of constructed wetlands, all filtration activity occurs below the ground, alleviating the problems of water stagnation, bad odour and risk of mosquito breeding.
So far, his foundation has worked with schools in Delhi and Uttarakhand, government colleges in Sundargarh, Odisha and Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Nainital, recycling over 6 lakh litres of water per year. This year, Prashant expects the number to increase to 10 lakh litres per year.
The organisation is self-funded and Prashant charges the schools/colleges only for the civil work. He hopes to turn it into a consultation service with an annual maintenance contract like the ones that water filter companies charge.
His working model is simple — providing greywater recycling as a service.
For the first two school projects, Prashant borrowed money from friends and family to build the solutions. He is now working with village administrations and the ashram on a revenue-based model.
“Wherever people can pay, we are taking a small fee. We want to generate revenue instead of depending on funds from larger players as this will enable us to fund initiatives in villages and communities who can’t afford it,” shares Prashant.
So far though, he is managing as his wife has a corporate job.
What keeps him going is the response on the ground. “The response has been very positive everywhere I’ve been. Right from villages to cities, people are fed up with stagnant water and want a solution,” shares Prashant.
According to this water conservationist, “The purpose of living has to be more than making money, it has to involve fulfilling the needs of people who are within your sphere of influence.”
You can email Prashant on [email protected] or call him on 9711086014.
Edited by Padmashree Pande, Images Courtesy Prashant Sharma
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