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#5 Bagasse-based cutlery startup finds foothold amid India single-use plastic bans

In India, a third-generation entrepreneur has built a company to produce biodegradable cutlery from sugarcane bagasse.
Samanvi Bhograj tells The Hindu she founded Visfortec to “make a difference” to her home city, Bengaluru. “I wanted to do business that had societal value and not just have another product,” she adds. “There had to be a solution to the amount of plastic being used mindlessly,” she says. Visfortec’s cutlery biodegrades in 60 days.
The biggest challenges for Visfortec were price and education. However, plastic bans in the region have changed the ways people approach plastics.
The science itself was also a challenge. She evaluated starch-based plastics and materials such as areca, banana fiber, bamboo, wheat straw, and rice husk before settling on bagasse.
“Bagasse is mainly discarded or used as fuel,” Bhograj says. “The other options are used as fodder for animals, so creating value from bagasse was the focus.”
More on the story.