Helpusgreen
takes the 800 million tons of flowers used annually in the country and makes
them into incense and soap.
In India, people like to
show their religious devotion with flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. Every
year, some 800 million tons of blossoms–red roses, yellow marigolds, prickly
xanthiums–are deposited at the nation’s temples, mosques and sikh gurudwaras,
creating a colorful, but tricky waste problem.
Because the flowers have
been used for worship, they’re sacred, and therefore can’t be just sent to
landfill, explains Ankit Agarwal, an Indian entrepreneur. Hindu temples often
throw the spent flowers into the River Ganges, a venerated waterway. But this
just exacerbates the Ganges’s legendary pollution: The flowers are sprayed with
pesticides and other chemicals that leach into the environment.
When Agarwal and his partner
and childhood friend Karan Rastogi first proposed finding alternative uses for
the waste, they met a lot of resistance. The temples thought the young men
wouldn’t treat the flowers with the required reverence, or that there couldn’t
possibly be a business in flower recycling. Two years on, they’ve proved the
naysayers wrong. Agarwal and Rastogi have a thriving company called
Helpusgreen, which produces a range of products from the flowers, including
incense sticks, enriched compost (735 tons so far) and bathing soaps.
“When we began in May 2015,
everyone thought we were mad,” Agarwal says, “No-one had seen anything come out
of flower waste before and they were like ‘Oh, you really think you’re going to
do something with that?'”
Author: BEN SCHILLER
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