Photo: tenithadithyaa.com

While most teenagers are busy with video games or engrossed in books preparing for board examinations, a young innovator from Tamil Nadu seems to have solved a problem the whole planet is struggling with: plastic waste.Tenith Adithyaa spent his childhood not on a PlayStation but in a home lab, brimming with ideas, and one of those ideas has grown into a way to turn quick-to-wilt banana leaves into a strong, long-lasting, and fully biodegradable alternative to plastic.

Meet Tenith Adithyaa, who builds biodegradable plates using banana leaves

Tenith Adithyaa belongs to Wartap village in Tamil Nadu and studied computer science engineering at SVS College of Engineering in Coimbatore. According to Mad4India, engineering is just one item on a surprisingly long list of interests; he's also been described as a coin collector, a teacher, a bird tamer, a software developer, and a gamer, having picked up 35 computer applications and six languages along the way, the same profile notes.The idea for his venture, Banana Leaf Technology, goes all the way back to when he was just ten years old. Tenith noticed farmers disposing of huge quantities of banana leaves and wanted to find a way to help them earn more from what was essentially being treated as waste. That childhood observation eventually turned into a patent-pending innovation, and it was documented in an Indian innovation programme in 2014 before being commercialised.

So how does it actually work?

Tenith describes it as a "cellular eco-friendly technology" that combines several natural preservation processes. Rather than adding chemicals, the process is such that it slows down the metabolic activity inside the leaf's cells, keeping their natural structure intact so the leaf doesn't age or decay the way it normally would, according to the venture's official website.These leaves are kept intact and preserved for 1-3 years. Once preserved, the leaves can be moulded into a surprising range of everyday items, like cups, plates, spoons, envelopes, gift wrap, and ice-cream cones, among them. Tenith has said the products come in four grades depending on how thick or durable they need to be. Importantly, the finished items remain 100 percent biodegradable and can even be used as manure once disposed of and the production cost of each leaf stanfds at just $0.01 or Rs. 0.94!

Tenith leads a beacon of change with novel thinking

Speaking to NDTV, Tenith explained, "We are habituated to using plastic plates, straws, cups, polythene, and packaging. Paper alternatives are used only once and create a lot of waste, so I came up with an idea to replace these with banana leaves." He's also said the process is quite cheap, telling The Spoon in an email that it costs "1 cent each use" and that finished items can biodegrade naturally in about 28 days.Of course, the technology isn't without its challenges. Banana leaves aren't nearly as widely available in North India as they are in the south, which could make the process costlier there and harder to scale for manufacturers, and large-scale procurement of leaves could put unnecessary strain on banana-producing regions.But still, Tenith Adithyaa's work is a rare example of a simple, traditional material being put to best use through genuine scientific curiosity.