TS girl wins Award for making pot from groundnut shells | Fusion - WeRIndia

Plastic bags are used to grow plant saplings, but when they are planted underground, they do not degrade in the soil for several years. To solve this issue, a 14-year-old girl from Telangana made a pot from groundnut shells.

Sreeja, a Class IX student of Zilla Parishad High School in Chintalakunta in Jogulamba-Gadwal district of Telangana made a groundnut shell pot.

She says that polythene bags used to keep saplings do not degrade in the soil even after years. Hence to find out a biodegradable alternative, she designed a pot from groundnut shells. She made it under the guidance of her Mathematics teacher.

To make this pot, she created pulp from groundnut shells and added some biodegradable natural ingredients. As the pot is biodegradable, sapling can be planted directly into the soil along with the pot.

Sreeja is aware of the usage of groundnut shells as agro-waste. She used to see that the powder of groundnut shells is used as an energy source and the pulp as manure in her village. Her Math teacher said that these shells are nutritious and rich in calcium and phosphorus. Moreover, groundnuts retain water.

For all these reasons, Sreeja used groundnut shells. She procured shells from a mill near her home and ground them to make into pulp. She then made it in the form of a cup. However, she did not succeed in her first attempt as the cup she made was too fragile.

Then her Math teacher advised her to add some other natural ingredients to the pulp. Sreeja followed the advice to make the cup strong and sturdy.

Then she added some soil and planted a neem sapling into the planter. She buried it underground and monitored it regularly to know the degraded time. It took less than 20 days for the pot to disintegrate into the soil.

Sreeja won the CSIR Innovation Award for her innovation. T-Works, Telangana validated her prototype.

This prototyping centre also offered her a prototype design for machinery to improve the production capacity.

Image by Shameer Pk from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)

Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/photos/hands-soil-plant-environment-5618240/