NUTLERY-A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH:
Nowadays the city is stuck in a new obsession that is craving for new FOOD. In the past ten years Karachi’s food industry hit a new mark from lavish continental fine dines to ‘desi dhabas’ , from fast food international chains to home based online food ventures everything is accessible and is just a touch away.
Since single-use plastic cutlery is commonly used around Pakistan. This cutlery is mostly made up of plastic and polystyrene or polypropylene. Each of these materials is polluting our environment in multiple ways. Hundreds of years are required to fully degrade the plastic. Some estimate that the number of plastics wasted is 3.3 tonnes each year in Pakistan, and most of them end in the landfills, unmanaged dumps, or strewn about land and waterways across the country, therefore there is a need to reduce the negative impact of single-use plastic in our ecosystem. Hence eco-friendly biodegradable cutlery is necessary.
The restaurants in Karachi usually provide single use plastic cutlery for dine in as well as for delivery and thereby causing the excessive use of single use plastic in the country. Single-use plastic pollution accumulates most visibly on our streets, in fact our water suffers even more. Litter can be the first stage in a water stream that enters waterways as plastics tossed on the street are washed away by rain or travel via storm drains into rivers and streams. Our waterway plastic pollution is particularly concentrated: Just ten rivers carry 93 percent of the world’s total amount of plastic that enters the oceans via rivers each year.
Therefore we have planned to take a baby step against this main cause of pollution that is the single use plastic cutlery, by creating awareness among the people regarding the biodegradable edible cutlery and its positive impact on our environment.
If the people specially the restaurant owners will show their interest in the edible cutlery we have also planned a future step to sell this cutlery to the restaurants. But since this step needs awareness to be created first that’s why for now we have decided to provide free samples to the restaurants and people and take feedback from them on the use of this edible cutlery which we have named as “Nutlery”.
PLANNING TOWARDS THE ACHIEVEMENT OF GOALS:
Since people are new to this idea at least here in Pakistan and there are lots of issues that will make people adaptable to this therefore as mentioned in this blog, we are going to do and implement few strategies that will give us an idea how it will work for people and most importantly the relevant audience i.e. Restaurants, food chains, Desi Dhabas, corporate offices, in order to know its relevance. Our homes can also benefit it from it but we are trying to target the frequency of usage and masses so the benefit of using it in the relevant audience is much higher than using it in homes though we have already tried it in our homes. We will do the following things first before using our idea to the aforementioned audience:
1) Qualitative/Quantitative Analyses
2) Questionnaire Analyses
3) Targeting the relevant audience
1) Qualitative/Quantitative Analyses
In order to gauge the awareness of this Biodegradable edible cutlery, we will first do a quantitative method and circulate the questionnaire based on its benefits and usage to the relevant audience. For the Qualitative part, we will approach any restaurant/food chain for an interview to know how they can use this and replace the traditional ones with this biodegradable. We will also let them know how this small step could make a difference to our planet without compromising on their service. This whole will hardly take one week.
2) Questionnaire Analyses
Once we get the responses then it will be an easy task to approach the most concentrated or target audience. Things like frequency of usage, number of daily visitors etc will help us to ensure when and how it will be easy for both i.e Users of biodegradable cutlery and target Food chain/Restaurant. Our analysis will give us an idea how people are aware of this concept and what sort of strategies we must follow in order to get this idea succeed which won’t be possible without knowing their idea about biodegradable cutlery. This process will take 3 to 4 days.
3) Targeting the relevant audience
For the test run, we will give a few samples to them but due to cost constraints, we will only provide them with samples 5 to 10 in order to check its validity and increase its awareness. We will visit them and it will require one week to know what sort of restaurant/food chains are comfortable using it.
The biggest challenge is trial and testing and hopefully our purpose will make it way to save our planet and make people realize the importance of safe and healthy environment free from pollution
DIVISION OF TASK IN THE GROUP:
The task was divided among team members in a way that everyone gets to put in some input. I was the one with the idea of the mega project. As I already had experience with creating biodegradable cutlery, I took the charge of creating videos on how to make the cutlery so that I can send it to other members of the group and they can also start working on creating the cutlery on their own. Fatima and Kulsoom immediately started working on the cutlery as soon as they received the video. The next step was making the packaging. As we were promoting biodegradable cutlery to replace single-use plastic, so it would not be suitable to use plastic packaging ourselves. We decided to make paper-bags as packages to keep and distribute the cutlery in. This task was given to our group member Aribah Murtaza. The next task was the distribution work. All members, especially boys were given the task to cooperate with distribution work.The task was to look for the areas where it will be easier to promote our cause and people will be interested in buying our product and then reach out to the restaurants and sell them the cutlery. For this purpose areas decided were DHA and Gulshan Chowrangi. Another task was to create questionnaires to get feedback from the people. This task was assigned to Farhan. He had to create effective feedback questions and get them printed out on paper so that we could get the feedback personally on the spot.
OUR ACHIEVEMENTS IN 15 DAYS:
1.Completion of final recipe:
We have completed our research on the accurate recipe of edible cutlery and have developed one. This recipe requires:
- 3 cup rice flour
- 3 cup flour
- 3 cup corn flour
- Water as required.
Mix all the ingredients and knead like a hard dough then give the shapes of spoon and fork and bake it for half an hour. After that dry it in the sun until they become hard.
2.Making of packaging:
Since this project is an eco-friendly project therefore we decided to distribute the cutlery in paper packages. Some of which have already been prepared.
3.Video of recipe:
We have also completed our video for the recipe of edible cutlery and are soon going to post it on Facebook and YouTube. Following are some pictorial representations of cutlery making steps.
