India throws away 120 billion disposable utensils annually. It creates serious land pollution and large amount of waste.
Narayan Peesapaty therefore founded the Bakey’s in Hyderabad in Central India at 2010 aiming to reduce the use of disposable utensils. He creates edible chopsticks and spoons made of millet, rice and flour, etc. Customers can even choose the taste of the spoon, original, sweet or spicy.
His idea originates when being a researcher in ICRISA. He discovered that the water resources in India are becoming less and natural wells are drying out. At the same time, more broomcorn is replaced by rice, which requires higher water resources to grow. For reference, 1kg of rice requires 5000kg of water for irrigation. So 1 ton of rice needs 5million water for irrigation. However several thousands tons of rice are rotten during storage annually. Therefore, to solve the problem of reducing water resources, he decided to create a market of growing anti-drought crops like broomcorn.
The broomcorn made spoon can store up to 3 years without any preservative added. If not eaten, it will self-degrade in soil in only 4-5 days. The price is also reasonable since he understand the major competitor is the cheap plastic disposable spoon. He hopes that his biodegradable utensils will soon dominate in restaurants to replace disposable utensils.
Source: Social Enterprise Insights
