Recycling Sapling Bags

 Experiment 1:

 

The lady who maintains my garden had a problem. She didn’t know what to do with all the plastic sapling bags that came from the plant nursery after she transplanted the saplings into the soil.

  

She said she keeps collecting heaps of these, and by now there is a room full of the sapling bags. So, I told her to bring a bag full for me to think about.

 

After she got sapling bags, we washed them. These bags now looked much better. But most of them were torn somewhere or the other while removing the saplings.

 

After that, one set was arranged very carefully on a sheet of newspaper such that they overlapped just slightly by about 1.0 cm. 

Then, the sapling bags were covered with the other half of the newspaper sheet taking care that the bags did not move from their set position. This way, the bags didn’t touch any other surface to which it might stick on being heated.

 

As the iron was hot by then, pressed the set-up over the upper newspaper. Again, I had to take care that the sapling bags did not move inside the two sheets of paper.

 

Above is how my ugly duckling looked in the beginning after removing the newspaper that was sticking to the sapling bags at places.

  

Some more paper came off when these bags were washed again. But, it was good that the overlapping portions did not come off. They kept sticking even while in water. This process was continued to get huge sheets of plastic. 

Experiment 2:

  

These were the sapling bags washed and dried like in the earlier experiment. 

       

Next, the base of each of these bags was cut to make a cylindrical sheet. It was flattened to form a double layer taking care that the holes in the sapling bags did not coincide. 

 

Thus, there were many such flattened cylindrical plastics that were flattened into double sheets. 

 

After that, two sheets were stitched on the longer sides to form a continuity. 

So, there were long serially stitched double sheets of the plastic from the sapling bags. 

 

Two such sheets were then stitched horizontally to form a broader sheet. And this process continued to give us a huge sheet of plastic. 

Result: 

 

After the sapling bags were converted into huge sheets, I gave them back to my garden-maintainer lady. She put those sheets on top of her hut in the nearby settlement. We have been successful so far with slight rains falling on these sheets and not going inside her hut. This picture above shows how she has put the sheets as an inner lining to the thatched roof, though, this is not her hut. While this experiment can be repeated anywhere required, let’s hope for the best. 

- Manjushri Parasnis

manjushrisavadi@gmail.com