Cooperative starts eco-friendly packaging

By A Staff Reporter, Kathmandu, May 19: The Aadhunik Agriculture Cooperative Limited in Ratnanagar Municipality-10 Tandi, Chitwan, has started producing environment friendly biodegradable packaging products to help reduce plastic use.

According to Deepak Gautam, secretary of the cooperative, the cooperative has been working with farmers for the past 10 years and recently began this new initiative with support from the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The FAO has supported this initiative NPR 59 Lakh 93 thousand 866 among the total amount NPR 74 Lakha 94 thousand 983. 

The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) supports forest and farm producers to improve livelihoods and build climate-resilient communities.

The programme has been operating in Nepal since 2018 and also contributes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Nepal’s climate commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Nepal produces around 165,000 tons of plastic products every year and imports large amounts of plastic to meet demand. The country also generates more than 242,000 tons of plastic waste annually, with a significant amount leaking into the environment.

According to the cooperative, the new machine can produce around 5,000 biodegradable packaging biodegradables pot every day. These biodegradable pots can be used for packaging dairy products such as curd, ice cream, honey, and pickles.

The packaging is made from natural materials including corn husks, sugarcane waste, and banana stalks using bio-chemical processing technology.

“We have been selling organic products, but they were packed in plastic, which is harmful to both human health and the environment,” said Gautam. “We were looking for support and planning for an alternative, and FAO supported our initiative.”

This week, the technology was officially handed over to the cooperative by Ken Shimizu, FAO Nepal and Bhutan Representative.

He said the project would help promote a green economy in the community.

“Plastic waste management is a major problem around the world and it harms both the environment and human health,” Shimizu said. “I hope this innovation becomes a turning point.” 

Secretary of the Cooperative, Gautam said that the cooperative is contacting different types of industry those who have been using plastic pots in their business. “Our goal is to reduce plastic use, we are talking about different types of business houses especially, dairy farms,” he said.