Taking on a blooming challenge

Time of India

7 hours ago

C
HENNAI: At dawn, Chennai's Koyambedu Flower Market bursts with colour and fragrance. But by night, thousands of kilograms of wilted petals and garlands are discarded as waste.
In terms of numbers, that's 100kg to 500kg of floral waste on average everyday, says S Mookandi secretary of Koyambedu Flower Merchants Association Chennai.
A handful of individuals and communities in the city are hoping to change that. Wasted 360 Solutions, a Chennai-based waste management company, co-founded by Ann Anra, for instance, has started Project Malar as a way to provide livelihoods by repurposing floral waste.
'We want to build a movement where people look at wet and floral waste differently,' says Ann. An initiative in collaboration with not-for profit Holy Waste, Project Malar began as a way to provide livelihoods to people from marginalised communities. 'Then we started working with senior citizens in Chennai through the NGO Kalaiselvi Karunalaya Social Welfare. They collect floral waste from Koyambedu Flower Market, help segregate it, and we then dry and process usable flowers into incense sticks, compost and bioenzymes,' says Ann.
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For Pallavi Turlapati, an IT professional, what began as a hobby preserving flowers from her home garden has now grown into a practice of upcycling discarded wedding garlands and bouquets into hand crafted keepsakes such as bracelets, earrings, pendants, clocks and photo frames. Couples send her their wedding garlands to be preserved, and she dries them using silica gel to preserve their colours before embedding them in resin.
'Upcycling gives a new life and purpose to these flowers and the memories tied to them through art. Every week, I go to Besant Nagar and collect all sorts of fallen flowers strewn on the ground and turn them into art,' says Pallavi.
Wasted 360 receives floral waste at their two drop sites in T Nagar and Tambaram through conservancy workers. 'Event organisers and wedding planners call us to pick up the floral waste from the venue for recycling,' she adds.
Once sorted and screened, the usable flowers are either composted or transformed into eco-friendly products such as wax fragrance bars, soaps, air fresheners, bio-cleaners and skin toners. 'This initiative has created employment for women from resettlement colonies such as Kannagi Nagar, Semmencheri, and Perumbakkam,' she says.
Temples, too, follow their own systems. 'The garlands offered to idols are considered sacred and special, so they are often sold to devotees. People usually pay the priests for them, and those visiting after purchasing a new vehicle are commonly given these garlands as blessings,' says a senior official from the Hindu religious and charitable endowments department.