The soil and climate of Bangladesh is suitable for forticulture. At present,flowers are cultivated on 6,000 hectares of land in urban areas of 24 districts inclusing Kushtia, Jhenidah, Chuadanga, Gazipur, Chattogram, Narayanganj and Cumilla. About 15 to 20 lakh people are earning their livelihood through this. The local market of flowers and cut foliage has reached TK1,600 crore per annum and is growing by 10 percent every year. Moreover,large quantities of flowers used in temples, ceremonies, and festivals are discarded as waste every day. No space to rethink that they are dumped into garbage, rushed into lakes, reservoirs. Also the soil gets nitrogeneted with mass amount of flower waste. Additionally, the disposal process often leads to clogged waterways and unpleasant odors, creating public health and sanitation issues. This situation presents both an environmental challenge and an untapped economic opportunity. Despite the availability of sustainable practices, there is a lack of widespread awareness and adoption of eco-friendly solutions to manage flower waste. So, I along with my team came up with a solution to turn waste into treasure.
Project Summery: After 3 months long reasearch, we discovered a formula to
make 100% natural, vegan and amazingly soothing fragnance stones made of
flower dust of collected flower wastesourced from areas of Dhaka.. Additional ingredients are butter oil, camphor (A scented volatile substance also used in sorbet and food), cinnamen/clove dust. It can be either used as a sacred religious purpose or poo-pouri alternative. In a smaller scale my teammates and I made this incense stones and fragnant sticks and sold some of them in handmade boxes to get reviews and further modification. Based on reviews, we have fixed the making process and done tranning workshops with poor flower shopkeepers including street women flower sellers community where we showed the procedure of making these products so that they can earn from it as an alternative income resources during off seasons and tackle their survivals. Most importantly, my team has done workshop with five students (aged over 18+) in a school of differently abled people named “Kalyani” taking priniciple’s consent and got precious responses from them. My Project Objectives: 1)Reducing waste and contributing to waste
management; 2) helping the target group of people to find alternative and
sustainable income source to tackle their hard times; 3) Ensuring inclusion odf
differently abled people in our economy.