Three students of the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology (BIT), Sathyamangalam, received a cash purse of ₹ 1 lakh for developing biodegradable non-woven bags from recycled fibre waste at the Bootcamp 2020 held at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras.
As many as 200 teams were selected to present their start up ideas, in which 19 teams were short-listed for the final round. The team comprising S. Vijayakumar, R. Ramkumar and L. Muralidharan, final year students of the Department of Textile Technology, BIT, had made the bags using natural binding agents as a replacement for the non-biodegradable bags made from polyethylene and polypropylene materials. They won second prize for their prototype idea.
The students said that the usage of non-biodegradable bags made from synthetic polymers was a major problem now as an average Indian family uses nearly 1,000 plastic bags a year. “Once dumped in the soil, polymer bags take about 500 years to degrade.”
The team decided to make eco-friendly single-use bags at affordable cost. “About 100 tonnes of recycled cotton fibre are thrown as waste a day in the country and hence we decided to develop shopping bags from it,” they said.
They used natural resins as an adhesive to produce these bags that can hold materials weighing six to 12 kg. These bags decompose within a month after disposal, they claimed.
Bags can be produced in different colours, printed with designs, logos, shop names, address, any style and sizes based on the customers’ requirement and the manufacturing cost of the bag is about ₹ 3 to ₹ 4. “These bags are good alternative for plastic, paper and woven shopping bags”, they said.
