Reducing Your Carbon Footprint – The ENVIGREEN Way!

By BWA Envoy
February 22, 2022
3 Minutes Read

Due to the dearth of cost-effective options, plastic continues to dominate the shopping and packaging business landscape, despite many restrictions on its usage. Entrepreneurs have investigated many eco-friendly alternatives, ranging from handmade paper bags to nutritious edible cutlery, but somehow none of these innovations has come close to the user-friendliness of plastic.

When Mangaluru City Corporation (MCC) imposed a ban on plastic ban in 2012, Ashwath Hegde joined the club of sustainable entrepreneurs by venturing into selling eco- friendly cloth bags. However, he soon realized that the cloth bags were not an alternative when a fisherwoman pointed out how selling 20 Rs Mackerel in a 25 Rs cloth bag was impractical.

After summarizing the user input (the need for an affordable and biodegradable product) and researching the problem for about four years, Ashwath Hegde founded EnviGreen Biotech India Ltd. (www.envigreen.com) - a company that produces eco-friendly bags that are 100% organic and biodegradable. The tagline of EnviGreen is ‘A tribute to Mother Earth’, where the eco-friendly product is a gift to mother nature.

Though the bags look exactly like plastic, they are anything, but plastic, and these bags would degrade in the span of 30-120 days, in contrast to plastic that takes about 300-500 years to decompose. As for the raw materials, it has about 12 completely natural ingredients, ranging from natural starches derived from tapioca, corn, and potato to a few vegetable oils. Even the paint used for printing is natural and organic, making the product completely chemical-free.

Coming to affordability, EnviGreen bags are far more economical and cost 500% less than the cloth bag, while it is slightly higher priced at about 35% more than that of the plastic bag. Certified by a long list of government agencies from Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) to Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), EnviGreen has applied for a US patent for their product.

Ashwath hails from Balanja, a village near Belthangady in Dakshin Kannada. An accident forced him to drop out of college, but instead of sitting idle, he dares to become an entrepreneur but loses Rs. 42 Lakh investment at the age of 22 and becomes depressed. However, instead of mourning the loss, he borrows Rs 15,000 from his mother and sets up a manufacturing unit for areca leaf plates. Modest success in this venture helps him successfully and confidently launch EnviGreen (EG). Fast forward 2017, Ashwath was listed in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his patented eco-friendly products. EG bags are marketed in 17 different countries, and the company boasts of an annual turnover of Rs 25-30 crore.