What if all you had to do to cut down Delhi’s pollution was to buy disposable plates? Swedish giant IKEA hopes to do just that. It has plans to develop products from crop residue on farms to help cut down the need for crop burning in North India. One of those products could be rice-straw plates. The company, which launched in India a few months ago, is the latest to come up with a solution to one of Delhi’s biggest challenges — its annual smog.
Every year, Delhiites brace themselves for the post-Diwali season, when residents are plagued with throat infections and eye irritation. Air pollution is linked to 2.5 million deaths in India every year, The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, a long-term project that involved more than 40 international health and environmental authors, reported last year.
IKEA thinks its pilot project could be a part of the solution. Helene Davidsson, sustainability manager South Asia, IKEA Purchasing says, “Our starting point was that we want to be a part of a solution to address air pollution. We want to have a positive impact on the communities we’re working with.” It is estimated that there are over 20-35 million tonnes of crop residue being burned in northern India alone.
Around 26 per cent of Delhi’s pollution is caused by stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, an IIT-Kanpur study found in January 2016. Stubble burning is the process by which paddy residue is set on fire after it has been harvested so that farmers can start sowing wheat. State governments have tried to curb the fires by imposing bans and fines. They also subsidise equipment to allow farmers to till their fields without needing to set them on fire.
IKEA, however, is a long way from putting their rice-straw plates on the shelves — they have yet to finalise the products they want to manufacture. To do that, they first need to undertake extensive testing and research. They will consider ways to gather stubble, how to pay farmers and how much stubble they need for sturdy products. Davidsson says they hope to go to market in two years. Meanwhile, Kriya Labs, a startup incubated at IIT-Delhi, is trying something similar. “IKEA provides a market [for our] end product, so they could be one of our customers,” says CEO Ankur Kumar. “But I personally don’t think that IKEA alone can handle that market.”
Kriya Labs has a machine that presses pulp from crops into plates and cups. The company wants to create a decentralised manufacturing system, according to Kumar. Medium and large scale farmers could own the machine, and collect stubble from neighbouring farms. Kumar says farmers could be paid Rs 5,000 per acre of crop residue they bring in. For every kilo of crop pulp, Kriya Lab machines can make 150-250 plates.
Like IKEA, the project is still at the pilot level.“We are at a stage where we are looking for partnerships to take this project to market as soon as possible,” says Kumar. They may even get in business with IKEA. Kriya Labs sent their prototype to the Swedish company a few months ago.
Other companies have taken an entirely different approach to the crop burning challenge. They want to keep burning — only in this case, it would be for energy production, not in the open air. One study, published in 2014 in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews estimated the potential energy from surplus crop residue could amount to as much as 17 per cent of India's total primary energy consumption. The European Bioenergy Research Institute at the Aston University in the UK built a machine called a Pyroformer, which can be transported from one village to another. It can produce pyrolysis oil, combustible gas and bio-char, which can fuel well pumps and farm equipment. According to published news reports, Farm2Energy, a startup set up by a group of farmers in India in 2016, claims that it can turn stubble into biofuel.
But Bhoopesh Punera, a research scholar at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Delhi, believes that energy from crop residue is not a solution. “This is not sustainable because [energy from crops] costs nearly ₹8 per unit, while solar energy is almost ₹2 per unit,” says Punera.
It will be a while before the IKEA and Kriya Labs projects give competition to energy from crops. And the projects will only be successful if they’re able to give enough financial incentive to farmers, who stress that the alternatives to stubble burning so far are too expensive for them. Even with government subsidies, burning is still the most cost efficient way for them to clear their fields in preparation for the next planting. Not surprisingly, some 700 fires in Punjab and over 900 in Haryana were detected this season, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. The smoke from the fires and the ensuing pall of haze, an ongoing NASA study states, spread all the way to Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Odisha.
Manon Verchot is a Delhi-based freelance journalist