Plastic waste is known to be an imminent danger to the environment in desperate need of a solution. Entrepreneurs from the Peruvian project
Chuwa Plant have come up with an innovative product that is meant to reduce environmental pollution. Through their ambitious program, they created disposable plates made out of banana leaves!
Project head Josué Soto explained in Spanish per
La Republica that the plates are made from banana leaves, paper, and cardboard cellulose. They are designed to decompose in up to 60 days—just two months! Their plastic counterparts, on the other hand, can take 500 years, a devastating prospect for plant and animal life within the planet’s oceans.
Soto says that his group is working closely and directly with banana cultivators in the Amazon, offering them fair payment for the work along with technical training. The project allows them to take advantage of waste from banana farming. According to Soto, to obtain the banana leaves necessary for the innovative plates, they don’t need to actually skin viable bananas as this happens naturally to the fruits during the picking process.
The unique dishes are designed for single-use and are heat and liquid resistant. They are shaped in rectangular, round, and square formats with an ideal plate size of 22 centimeters by 16 centimeters by 3 centimeters. Not only that, but according to
Empreder, they also don’t contain the carcinogenic styrene, which is a byproduct of petroleum, found in most other plastic containers.
According to Empreder, the ingenious program participated in a contest run by
Innóvate Peru Program, a Peruvian organization that focuses on promoting new business ideas that are friendly towards the environment. It succeeded in receiving 50,000 soles (approx US$15,000) worth of funding from them. With that money, Chuwa Plant was able to design and build specialized machinery to produce the plates, including a presser, a shipper, and a die cutter. The company began manufacturing its plates on a mass scale of around 50,000 each month.
So far, the banana-leaf-based plates are being slowly introduced to the market with the aim of replacing plastic plates at events across Peru. And they have achieved sales of over 9,000 soles (approx. US$2,700).
The project creators have their vision set on business growth and introducing their plates commercially to natural restaurants and eco-friendly wineries.
Due to the unique design, the plates are currently more expensive than their plastic alternatives, but Chuwa Plant has plans of bringing the costs down and making them more affordable.
“The approximate sale price of our dishes is 100 to 120 soles (US$29.64-35.56) for 100 plates, depending on the thickness of the sheet, but over time it may be more accessible to all consumers,” Soto explained per La Republica.
