WastEd — a Waste Education Initiative by Funeducated

What does a truly zero-waste city look like — and does one already exist in India? In this episode of Wasted, Shreya takes us inside three Indian cities that stopped waiting for a perfect solution and built their own. Alappuzha, a backwater town in Kerala, now sends less than 2% of its waste to landfill — using nothing more than community composting and political resolve. Indore has topped the Swachh Survekshan rankings for seven years straight, powered by GPS-tracked trucks, musical collection vans, and a civic commitment that outlasted elections. And Pune's SWaCH cooperative put 4,000 waste pickers — mostly Dalit women — at the centre of a system that now serves 6 lakh households with a 95% satisfaction rate.These aren't outliers. They're blueprints. This episode is about what happens when cities stop treating waste workers as an afterthought and start treating them as infrastructure — and what it would take for every Indian city to follow suit.This week's action: Look up your city's Swachh Survekshan rank, and ask your local councillor one simple question — what is our ward's waste segregation rate?Wasted is a Waste Education Initiative by Funeducated.For more information or collaboration, visit www.funeducated.com/wasted or email [email protected]

Only 9% of all plastic ever produced has actually been recycled — and in this episode, Shreya unpacks why. From the 1970s industry campaign that sold us recycling as a fix for single-use plastic, to why most of what you put in the blue bin ends up in landfill anyway, this episode dismantles the myth that recycling alone can solve our plastic problem. We look at India's bin system, the informal recycling powerhouse of Dharavi, and why Extended Producer Responsibility — not better bins — might be the real path forward.For more details or collaboration visit www.funeducated.com or email [email protected]

Hazardous waste doesn't disappear — it settles. Into soil, into water, into the bodies of people who never chose to live near it. In this episode, Shreya traces the geography of toxic waste in India, who bears its burden, and why the law alone has not been enough to stop it.For more information visit www.funeducated.com or email us at [email protected]

Your old phone didn't disappear — it went somewhere. In this episode, Shreya traces where discarded devices end up, who handles them, and at what cost. E-waste is the world's fastest-growing waste stream, and India sits at the centre of it. But so do some of the most promising solutions.For more information, visit www.funeducated.com or email us at [email protected]

Enormous amounts of food are wasted every year — while millions go to bed hungry. In this episode, Shreya follows food waste from the farm to the landfill, unpacking why the gap between food wasted and food needed is one of India's most urgent — and most solvable — contradictions.For more information visit www.funeducated.com or email us at [email protected]

Plastic was designed to last forever. We decided to use it once. In this episode, Shreya unpacks India's plastic crisis — how a material meant to be a marvel became the world's most persistent pollutant, where it ends up, and who is already building a way out.For more information visit www.funeducated.com or email us at [email protected]

Before we can fix the waste crisis, we need to understand how we created it. This episode traces how the world — and India — went from zero-waste living to generating billions of tonnes of rubbish every year. From the kabadiwala to the throwaway economy, from Ghazipur to Alappuzha — this is where the story begins.Wasted — a Waste Education Initiative by Funeducated. For more details and collaboration visit www.funeducated.com or email us at [email protected]