Banana leaf plates as a means to rethink materials

Written by Anna da Costa / 25 January 2009 / Read Anna da Costa's latest blog entries.

As we travel along the road, we're promoting ten key transformative solutions that we feel are crucial to tackling climate change. One of these is rethinking materials. So many of the materials we use in our day to day life are energy intensive, non-recyclable and/or toxic. These include plastics, energy intensive building materials, packaging, and household utensils to name a few. They have an increasingly short lifetime in our hands, and a long lifetime after use in waterways, landfills and the bodies of us all.

India is home to an incredible array of traditional solutions to sustainable material use, some of my favourites including clay cups for chai, wrapping vegetables in newspaper with string, and of course banana leaf plates. When did these get unfashionable?

Clay cups have been replaced by small plastic cups that litter the roadsides, railway tracks and water bodies; plates, once steel or banana leaf, are now plastic too, cluttering landfills and intermingling with valuable organic waste that could be fertilising fields. Groceries and clothes are now wrapped in upto five different types of packaging, all of which have to be removed and disposed of as soon as we reach our home.

Here is a video of one such solution;