DAVID ADAMS reports on an innovative way one Indian company is working to help the environment…
Created as an alternative to the billions of plastic utensils used around the world each year (and in particular the 120 billion discarded in India alone), an Indian-based company has created what has been billed as the world’s first edible cutlery.
Frustrated with the plastic utensils he saw piling up in India’s landfills, Hyderabad-based Narayana Peesapaty founded Bakeys in 2011 to make edible spoons.
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PICTURE: From the Bakeys website
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Mr Peesapaty, who has worked as an agriculture consultant and conducted research into ground-water use in India, writes that he first had the idea after watching people use hard Indian breads to eat their meals with.
“This pushed me to work on an organic spoon made of food, as an alternative to plastic spoons.”
The company has reportedly been selling as many as 1.5 million spoons a year since they first hit the market.
The spoons are made out of millet (sorghum) blended with rice and wheat and the makers say millet was selected as the main ingredient thanks to the fact that it consumes 60 times less water than rice when being grown (not only that, for the same energy used to produce one plastic spoon, the company says it can make 100 millet-based spoons.
The spoons, which are designed for one use only and can even be used in hot drinks without turning soggy, come in eight different flavours including sugar, ginger-cinnamon, mint-ginger, black pepper and carrot-beetroot. Left in its packaging, they can have a shelf life of up to three years while, once opened, they will start decomposing in just a few days meaning that even if they are thrown away, rather than eaten, they’ll soon disappear.
Bakeys is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to expand its operations, not only so it can make more spoons, but also so it can creating forks and chopsticks. When Sight looked this week, the amount raised had far surpassed the $US20,000 sought and was sitting at almost $US190,000. The campaign closes this month.
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