While you were in school, the environmental hazard disposable pens posed was lost on us all. Even if you used a refill, it didn’t last very long and were discarded in little to no time, slowly piling on to the mountains of non-biodegradable trash. A sustainable option was probably the last thing on anyone’s mind back in school — until some students from Panchayat Union Middle School, in Pudupalayam village, Tamil Nadu, created an organic pen.
Under the guidance of their teacher S. Dinesh, Dhanraj, Danush, Manojkumar, Jothipriya, Sankar, and Tamilselvan developed a pen entirely out of natural materials. To render the body with the requisite stiffness, plantain leaf, papaya leaf stem, coconut leaf, and castor stem were used. The tube was then sealed with maida starch at one end and filled with ink. With the nib fixed at the other end, the pen was ready to use. It works for a good few months before it needs to be thrown away, reports The Better India. On discarding, the pen shall become organic manure, thereby adding to the environment constructively. Their invention has already been tested and has been used by fellow students of the school for quite some time now.
Buying and discarding of plastic pens has become an endless process, degrading nature considerably. This assertion was strongly buttressed by the students’ survey that ‘about 5.68 lakh students from the primary class to Plus-Two in the district throw away 160 tonnes of used plastic pens a year’, as reported by The Hindu. Their novel solution, however, has been reviewed by Tamil Nadu Science Forum, and shall soon be submitted for the prestigious National Science Congress 2017.
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