We upcycle banana stem agro-waste by transforming it into soft and absorbent pulp to make our banana fibre pad which not only reduces waste, but also provides extra income to farmers.

India has around 800,000 hectares of banana plantations. While the plants grow rapidly (just 9 to 12 months), their stems typically become agro-waste once the fruits are harvested, leaving behind 64 million tonnes of unwanted and unused agro-waste.

For us, a circular economy denotes a reduction in the amount of waste generated. For starters, we do not require any extra land to procure banana fibres we utilise in our pads as they are a byproduct of the abundantly available banana tree stems. Next, we utilise every part of the banana stem; when the fibre is extracted from it, nutritious banana stem sap is also generated, which doubles as our organic fertiliser. We also recover banana stem scutchers which can be used to produce vermicompost.

We developed GreenCycle Program to ensure that our sustainable products can be properly composted and go back to nature after their disposal.

It’s no secret that conventional absorbent hygiene products are chock-full of non-biodegradable, petrochemical by-products. These are simply not sustainable in the long run as they generate thousands of tons of waste which remains unchanged in landfills for over 500 years.

As a first step, we have replaced non-biodegradable ingredients with renewable and compostable ones to make our products as sustainable as possible. Secondly, our plan is to create separate collection and composting infrastructure to make the large-scale composting of absorbent hygiene products a reality, while emphatically reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills and incinerators.