Recycling floral waste

Aug 21, 2018

A chemical engineer and eco-entrepreneur Parimala Shivaprasad has come up with a unique solution for India’s floral waste. Mainly generated at religious sites in several tons each year, a small scale setup to extract aromatic oils can be a key solution to cleaning up our rivers and polluted sites.

"I want to collect the floral waste and extract the essential oils from the fragrant part, the biomass, and then compost the rest of the biomass to produce organic manure, looking at completely recycling the flower waste," she says.

"The early idea is to scale up the lab equipment I have to accommodate about five kilos of flower petals to work with on a daily basis and run the extraction unit for about eight hours a day," she says.

This addresses a key issue that has stymied the cleanup of major rivers in India and our riverbanks.

Source : BBC News