Environmental and Health Degradation on the Rise

Environmental and health degradation has been arising as a contemporary problem of global world root cause of it is no other than human being themselves and increasing waste due to urbanization and industrialization. Nepal being an underdeveloped country has witnessed drastic but unplanned urbanization in the last decade. The current urban population is touching about 16% of the total population of our country, and according to estimates by the social specialist, it will grow up to 24% by the next decade (JICA, 2005). Despite of different negative effect unmanaged solid waste is the worst effect of urbanization responsible for degradation of health and environment of the area.

Categorized both as bio-degradable and non-biodegradable, solid wastes chiefly comes from household, market, industries, medical field etc. Wastage from food has chief share on biodegradable wastes. Food losses takes place at different stage i.e. production, postharvest and processing stages in the food supply chain variably. Food losses occurring mainly at the end of the food chain (retail and final consumption) are rather called “food waste”. (Parfitt et al., 2010). On food losses, fruits and vegetable are highly perishable and goes to the state of waste very soon as they are living entity and are rich in water content. The deterioration can be microbial, physiological or mechanical. Rather fruits and vegetables are wasted due to financial, managerial and technical limitation in harvesting techniques in field, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems.

In Nepal, mainly fruits and vegetables wastage contribute the major share in biodegradable waste and the wastage occurs in collect...

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... several social and religious functions. Marigold is considered as one of the important commercial flower in Nepal however its production area and productivity is quite low. Marigold is known as heavy feeder plant especially of nutrient like nitrogen and phosphorous (Nalwadi, 1982).

The area under marigold have been stagnant over many years in Nepal and many constraints including unavailability of inorganic fertilizers for its commercial cultivation has also been one of the bottleneck in modern floriculture business of Nepal. Thus the use of vermin products in this crop can also provide additional advantage. Thus the two way advantage can be obtained by utilizing the biodegradable solid wastage for the preparation of vermin products and again using these products in our crops. Thus this chain may be a milestone in the development of agriculture in case of Nepal.