Green Businesses: The Temple Experience

Abstract

India is a land of temples and worshipping in temples is a way of life. This entails offering flowers, leaves, coconut, and fruits. Besides these, milk, water, and honey, etc. are also offered as offerings to the deity. In India, there are temples that are dedicated to a single deity and to multiple deities as well, where a specific flower is offered as an offering to these deities. Thus, almost each temple is able to collect these offerings in large quantities. The flowers like roses, marigold, lotus, hibiscus, and jasmine, bela, etc. are offered, and hence collected in huge quantities in temples. Each of the offerings has a lot of value in terms of their reuse and biodegradability. If the planning is not done well for these offerings as to what needs to be done with it, it converts to a huge amount of garbage. Sending the garbage to the local dump is not the answer. The recycling of this waste from the temples can lead to the creation of various new products like dyes, essence, and incense, compost, etc. Now, this is only possible, if it is properly managed. Temple waste management has led to the emergence of a number of new industries which are “green” in nature and have a substantial social impact. This paper aims to explore the potential for new cottage and micro industries as “green social enterprises”, which tend to emerge from the waste generated from the temples. Such “green business” would help reduce, mitigate, prevent and enhance the capacities of micro entrepreneurs to reduce environmental risks through a universally available raw material in most of India.