These eco-friendly 'crackers' grow into vegetable plants

A group of volunteers are busy making gift boxes of crackers at Pakshikere. However, these firecrackers are different. The crackers neither emit smoke nor make any sound. Instead, they turn into flowers and vegetable plants once they decompose in the soil.

Paper Seed Co, a social enterprise based in Pakshikere, on the outskirts of Mangaluru, which has been engaged in preparing eco-friendly rakhis and badges using vegetable seeds all these years, has ventured into plantable seed crackers this year on the occasion of the Deepavali.

Nithin Vas, the founder of Paper Seed Co, said, “Deepavali is incomplete without firecrackers and sparklers. We wanted to explore eco-friendly ways to celebrate festival. Made to resemble like firecrackers such as rockets, ground spinners, bombs, flower pots, these bright cracker lookalikes have seeds in them.’’

The idea is to encourage people to go for pollution-free celebrations, he told DH.

He said, “The crackers are handmade and handcrafted using a recycled paper and cardboard. It is degradable and gets decomposed in soil and grows into plants. The rural women in Pakshikere were trained in making all the lookalike crackers and assembling. The process of embedding them with seeds was done by us at the Paper Seed,” he added.

The flowerpot cracker is embedded with the seeds of okra and cucumber while that of ‘nelachakra’ has seeds of radish. In a single cracker, there are seeds of sunflower, beetroot and raddish. In a bomb cracker, there are seeds of tomato, chilli, cucumber and radish while in ‘maala pataki,’ there are seeds of radish, tomato and chilli.

“We have prepared gift boxes for these lookalike crackers,” said Vas. The seeds of red amaranthus are also used in the crackers. The sticks used in the ‘rockets’ were sourced from Assam.

“The raw materials for the plantable crackers were sourced from various parts of the country. The plan is to prepare around 1,000 gift boxes,” he said. The women were given the raw materials and asked to make the products in their homes.

“Before we train women, we made a study on the crackers to resemble the product. The funds raised from the sale of crackers will be used for the Paper Seed Village, the work of which has begun recently.’’

“The work on the construction of Paper Seed village has reached till the wall. With the funds from the sale of plantable crackers, we are planning to do the work on the roof,” he said.