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We started our immersion from Bangalore. We took evening bus and reached Bangalore on 11^th July 2017 in morning. After reaching Bangalore we directly went to India Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. There we met Mr. H. I. Somashekhar who is Technical Officer at Application of Science and Technology for Rural Areas (ASTRA)/ Centre for Sustainable Technologies, IISc Bangalore.

The Centre for Sustainable Technologies (CST) established as Centre for ASTRA (Application of Science and Technology for Rural Areas) in 1974, is IISc’s inter-disciplinary research and technology development centre for providing sustainable solutions to host of global concerns, primarily dealing with energy, buildings and environment. The Centre’s focus is on promoting Sustainable Technologies tailored to suit local conditions of resource availability and habitation.

Successful examples of CST’s diverse interventions are, Energy Efficient Wood Burning Devices, Biomethanation, Biomass Gasification, Alternative Building Technologies, Green Buildings and BiPV, Water Purification and Defluoridation, Sanitation, Sustainable Biomass for Energy, Forestry, Bioenergy & Climate Change, and Environmental Quality Assurance-Impact Studies.

He shared his insights on sanitation, waste management and waste to value. He told us about Rammed Earth Model of toilets which they developed in IISc. In rammed earth model they use moulds for rapid construction of sanitation facilities.

After meeting with Mr. H.I. Somashekhar, we visited Kunigal to see rammed earth sanitation facilities. Most of the toilets are in good condition but we saw some toilets are being used as store room by the villagers. We also interacted with villagers and some primary school kids and teachers.

Author – Pramod Bhurji, BIRAC SIIP Fellow at Venture Center, Pune

About Featherlite: Incorporated in 1965 Featherlite is one of the leading furniture manufacturing organisation in India today, providing complete office furniture solutions for all segments of market through its strong base of direct and franchisee offices present across 54 locations in India. Featherlite core expertise lies in manufacturing and marketing extremely innovative and cost effective customised office furniture such as modular work stations, chairs, partitions, desks conference tables educational, laboratory, retail furniture and fixtures. The company manufactures more than 30,000 chairs and 8000 workstations in a month. Operating from factory space spanning more than 3 lakh sq. feet, the company has over 10,000 esteemed customers pan India including giants like Cognizant, Mercedes, Hindustan Unilever, Caterpillar etc. (Source: http://www.featherlitefurniture.com/company-profile)

The SIIP Team visited Featherlite’s factory at Mysore Road, Bangalore to study the waste management practices in furniture industry. The company has achieved zero discharge and 100% recycling of its solid waste materials.  When designing a plan, they give importance to reducing the waste at source itself. The major types of waste are as below:

1. Saw dust: Cyclonic separators are installed at multiple places to vacuum out any saw dust being generated. It is later collected at a common place and sold for making incense sticks.

2. Metal Scrap: Any metal scrap generated is sold to recyclers.

3. Wooden Scarp: Small pieces of wooden pieces are sold to small furniture makers or for making photo frames.

4. Fabric Scarp: It is sold to Army’s wife association to make carry bags.

5. Other wooden waste: Very small wood/fabric particles is gasified to generate electricity and heat. The waste heat is used to dry panel boards or any other unit operations requiring heat treatment.

6. Waste Water: Any effluent generated is treated and used for gardening purposes.

Featherlite also boasts of it’s clean energy initiatives and have installed solar panels which covers a rooftop of 70,000 sq.ft. A total number of 3,000 solar panels have been installed each generating 320Wp of power per day.

About the Author: Shubham Singh is presently working as the BIRAC Social Innovator at Venture Center, Pune.

WasteLess is non-profit social enterprise based at Auroville which designs waste related educational materials for school students. Started in 2011 by Ribhu and Chandrah, WasteLess emerged from their passion toward waste management. In 2009, they organized a ‘Litter Free Auroville Campaign’ which was attended by more than 2000 people. It was after this, that they realized that behavioural change is a massive barrier towards waste management practices.

Amidst the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and multitudes of awareness campaigns, WasteLess hits right at the spot by reaching out to the kids. What is being taught at the school prepare the kids for the future. Waste education so far has been little or untouched in the curriculum. The ideology of WasteLess has a potential to create an enormous ripple effect and change the way we deal with the waste we generate.

About the Author: Shubham Singh is presently working as the BIRAC Social Innovator at Venture Center, Pune.

As a part of immersions, we visited a dry segregator established and operating out of Auroville, Pondicherry. The unit is headed by a couple residing within Auroville, Palani. K and Kali. Their main philosophy is to offer a better waste management solution to the communities residing within the Auroville campus by offering them an end to end service by managing their dry waste.

Following are the highlights of the visit:

• Eco services request residents and communities to segregate their waste at source in as less as 6 and as many as 13 categories. Some of the basic segregation categories are:

– Paper

– Plastic

– Metal (Aluminium, Copper is maximum)

– Glass (Broken and unbroken separately)

– Non-recyclable

– Sanitary

– Tetrapack

– Thermocol

– Cardboard

– Leather

– Batteries

– Tyres

• The entire model of Eco Service hinges on community participation as the primary segregation is the key. The “Ammas” (local ladies) doing the secondary segregation require a certain level of segregation at source.
  Now, since Auroville is a very closed gate community these rules and regulations can be easily emphasised and monitored, which can be a hassle in other situations.
• The Ammas doing secondary segregation re-segregate the waste into as many as 82 categories from the initial separation. This ensures the right waste can reach the right recyclers. Eco Service stores this waste and drops it off at the right recycling locations once an optimum quantity is reached.
• The recyclers buy this waste from Eco Services at an price depending on at which tier it is being sold at. The revenue generated from this is distributed to Ammas and the waste generators based on a pre decided split up. A 8-10% of the profit is retained by Eco-Service as the operational and logistics expense.
• Eco-services charges the communities for the waste picking charges depending on what kind of waste is being offered. A completely or partially segregated waste is collected at ₹60/ bag of paper, plastic. However, an unsorted waste is collected at a value of ₹180/ bag.
• Eco-service is currently facing issues to procure the technology or manage recyclers to manage the double sided plastic, tetra-pack and thermocol.
• Eco-Services has also come up with different types of innovative solutions to deal with some of the waste. For example:They have made a concrete cup like structure which they fill up with used batteries and then pour concrete to fill it up and seal it off. These cups are then planted with decorational plants and are used as landscaping artifacts.

  They chop down the thermocol into smaller pieces and mix it with concrete to make non load bearing partitions which can be used in the houses and offices within the premises of Auroville.

Author: Monish Deshmukh, BIRAC SIIP Fellow at Venture Center, Pune

About Speaker –

Archana Joshi is Assistant Manager at Intellectual Property Facilitation Center (IPFACE), Venture Center. IPFACE is a project of Venture center,funded by MSME(govt. of India) and NCL.IPFACE provides services regarding trademark,patent filing,drafting,GI filing,patentability assesment etc. IPFACE also conduct Awareness talks at various institutions and organize workshops in IPR.

She has done M.Sc. in Organic Chemistry and PG Diploma in Patents Law from NALSAR and also, she is registered Patent Agent.

Lecture –

On 08^th July 2017, under the Start-up 101 Lecture Series for Entrepreneurs, Archana Joshi offered a talk on ‘Patents and Patent Filling Procedures’. She started her lecture with explaining basic terminology used in patents and patent filling.

What is Patent?

It is one of the type of Intellectual Properties (IP). Patent is exclusive right to protect your technology which is granted by Government. It’s a territorial exclusive right to inventor or their assignees which is assigned for limited period of time (20 years, from date of first filling date).

Now, question comes in why and when to file patent. Patents can fetch good amount of money, goodwill, you can gain recognition and can restrict other person from infringement. She gave some examples like – Hitachi earned $455 million in patent royalties in 1996. It paid approximately $91 in patent licensing fees on the technologies it got from others. Thus, it made a profit of $364 million in 1996 in its patent trade and patents made a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.

When to file Patent?

Before disclosing your innovation to anybody anywhere. For example – Before submitting PhD thesis or before displaying in exhibition.

Novelty is the primary criteria to get any patent. Further, she explained the check list of Patentability-

1. Is your innovation novel?
2. Check if you have clearly added value to an existing product
3. Who will benefit from your invention
4. Search for similar ideas in patent databases
5. Search for existing technology (Websites – Alibaba.com and Indiamart.com)
6. Expected profits
7. Search for potential licenses and investors

Once you file patent it takes some time to get patented. Below are the timelines –

About the Author:  Pramod Bhurji, BIRAC Social Innovator at Venture Center, Pune