social startups

With beautiful captions like “we’re from the garden of forever”, this start-up has been creative waves amongst gardening enthusiasts. It is an online based company which provides gardening solutions. It gives the urban population a chance to spend minimal time on their in-house garden and witness spectacular results. Springfinity aims at helping people grow a lively patch inside a matchbox house by spending only 20 minutes daily.

The start-up was founded by Anand Sarkar who dared to believe that colourful patches could exist in urban spaces as well. Amal Roy (Sarkar’s classmate from MICA) and Salim have managed to successfully tap the fast growing Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability of the country. It helped them build Sprinfinity as a one stop for plants, accessories and organic produce.

The team believes itself to be an epitome of gardening solutions and the gardening kit available will help the customer get his garden set in no time. The DIY kit which is the most popular product includes the right kind of pot, hanger, flowered plant, Springfinity guide, magic bloom, sprayer, gloves and a maintenance mix. Other products available on the website include different plants which can be grown indoor like 5 sticks indoor bamboo, green cryptanthus, green cordyline etc, bird feeders and different kinds of planters.

Often, delivering alive plants is seen as a challenge. However, the team of Springfinity who are all gardening enthusiasts have found stellar solutions to this problem as well. The plants packaged in a unique way are shipped carefully to the customer and remain safe and arranged. Another challenge that this start-up faces is consistency of availability of the featured inventory as most of the plants are sourced from Kerala and Bengaluru. To counter this problem, they are looking to add smaller nurseries to their portfolio.

Currently they’ve shipped products to South India, Goa, Maharashtra, Kolkata and NCR successfully. The gnomes (team of Sprinfinity) plan to introduce new products like seeds and kitchen garden accessories to their website very soon.

To know more about Springfinity or start your own garden, log on to http://springfinity.com/.

Most Indian cities have banned the use of plastic bags which is a refreshing change taking into consideration the environmental damage they cause. Out of the 15000 tonnes of plastic which is disposed every month, only half of it is processed while the rest is consumed by animals or left to degrade by itself. However, everybody will agree on the fact that the plastic bags were useful for carrying back groceries. To combat the environmental hazards, a Qatar-based Indian entrepreneur, Ashwanth Hegde has come up with a brilliant solution.

After conducting a rigorous research for almost four years, he has come up with the idea of EnviGreen which makes organic, eco-friendly and biodegradable bags. These bags by EnviGreen look exactly like plastic bags but are made of natural starches and oil derivatives. These bags degrade in 180 days when thrown onto the streets and cause no harm when eaten by stray animals. The process of making these bags is a complex one as it uses twelve ingredients: potato, tapioca, corn, natural starch, vegetable oil, banana, and flower oil. The twelve raw materials are first transformed into liquids and through a complex six-step procedure, the end-product, i.e. the bag, is ready. The procedure is devoid of any chemical usage and the paints used are completely organic. These bags are a little more expensive than your normal plastic bag but considering how eco-friendly they are, they are soon going to become an alternative to our generic polythene. The Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) has already given thumbs up to the use of these bags.

Ashwanth, with his small but dedicated team of 60 people, has set up a new factory in Bengaluru where they aim to produce 1000 tonnes of bags each month. The raw materials are sourced from the farmers locally. The bags are going to be available in India shortly but have already made a presence in Qatar and United Arab Emirates.

These bags by EnviGreen will definitely reduce the environmental problems posed in the country due to plastic.