31 December,2018 11:29 AM IST | Mumbai | Snigdha Hasan
The calendar comes packed in a cloth bag made of textile waste
It's been six months since the statewide ban on single-use plastic was imposed, and if you have been consciously monitoring your use of the material, its ubiquity may have only become more apparent. From coasters and toothbrushes to the plastic lids of your glass dabbas and even the spiral that holds the pages of a calendar together, the more insidious it is, the tougher it is to eliminate.
As a step towards changing that, Everything Eco, a Vasai-based venture that deals in eco-friendly products of daily utility, has created a desk calendar for 2019 with no trace of plastic. Made from recycled paper, the 12 sheets of the calendar are embedded with 12 different varieties of seeds. So, at the end of every month, you can remove one sheet, place it in a pot, cover it with soil and pour water to watch it sprout into a sapling in a matter of a few days.
"We didn't want to use a plastic spiral for the calendar, otherwise we'd be defeating the purpose. So, we've used a band made of yarn to hold the pages together," shares founder Anu Pillai, who was a business development associate before starting the venture one and a half years ago. The seeds chosen are well-suited for Mumbai's climate and include spinach, tomatoes, brinjal, chillies, coriander, onion, mustard and indigenous cotton.
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Interestingly, each page of the calendar also features a short write-up on other green ventures in the city. "What we realised is that people are keen on using eco-friendly alternatives but don't know where to buy them from. So, you'll find information on an NGO that's into recycling and an enterprise that manufactures bamboo products and handicrafts," Pillai explains. When we point out that it's a novel way of approaching a business, she says, "When it comes to small businesses [working towards the same goal], collaboration, not competition, is the way to go."
LOG ON TO: Everything Eco on Facebook
CALL: 8087180464
COST: Rs 650
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