Youth action: saving our soils 1

© H. Zahidah

There are many things you can do to improve soil right where you are, so be inspired by these examples promoting soil improvement and sustainability, led by young people from the UNEP-partnered Bayer Young Environmental Envoy (BYEE) and Volvo Adventure young environmentalist programmes.

Haneesa Zahidah, Malaysia, BYEE 2010

As president of the green team at my university, I was looking for something sustainable that ordinary people could do. That’s when I found out about Takakura composting, a well-structured yet straightforward method that I thought would work for Malaysian households, as it’s time-efficient and suitable for the tropics. Invented by Japanese scientist Koji Takakura, this method of composting takes a maximum of 26 days to produce compost, less than a third of the usual time.

You start by making fermentation solutions with sugar and salt. The sugar solution consists of water, brown sugar and fermented soy (known as tempeh in Malaysia); the salt fermentation solution consists of water, vegetable scraps and/or fruit peels, and salt. These are left for five days to ferment.

When the solutions are ready, they’re mixed with a combination of rice husk and bran and left for five days in a cardboard box, until a layer of white mould forms. Then the mixture is ready for scraps. A small plastic or wicker container lined with cardboard is filled with the mixture to about the 60 per cent level, and chopped vegetable and fruit scraps are added. It is covered with cloth, and stirred daily, and more scraps are added until the container is full. The compost is then transferred to a sack and left to mature for two weeks.

Takakura is a particularly good method for any country that produces rice, as the husk and bran are only used for chicken feed or otherwise thrown away. In 2010, I introduced Takakura composting at my university, gathering organic waste from the cafeteria and setting up a small composting site at the Faculty of Architecture. In two months we produced about 50 kilos of compost, used for landscape gardening on campus. I’ve now begun a training project at a school in a neighbouring state; they intend to use their compost in their science garden.

I plan to carry on promoting composting as a waste management system in more schools and institutions while giving away compost samples; seeing, touching and smelling soil helps people realize how valuable composting can be.