“You don’t have to be brilliant to create effective recycling programs,” Rajah Banerjee said from across his desk last April. He shuffled papers, stopped to pour me another cup of Darjeeling tea, and then looked up again. “You just have to observe the poor and you’ll see what’s possible.”
Observing the poor was an easy task to come by in India, and in doing so I witnessed some very literal ways we could all stand to get our, well… dung together a bit better. I’d been in India just under three weeks, in a home stay volunteer program at Banerjee’s Makaibari Tea Estate, 35Km south of Darjeeling, and was helping to revitalize the farm’s compost project. Makaibari is a model tea producer — the first organic tea farm in India, among the first to become fair trade, and one of the only to practice biodynamic agricultural principles. Producing compost onsite had fallen by the wayside, and building large centralized compost beds became the primary focus of my volunteer work, and the beginning of my explorations in poop.

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