Plastic ban: Paper cup maker eyes share in eco-friendly market

Currently, the demand for plastic coated paper cups, plates, containers and trays put together across India is 25,000 mt per month. In Tamil Nadu, the demand for paper cups is about 1,800 metric tonnes (mt), while 1,500 mt of paper plates and containers are used in the state every month. Chandraganti Subba Rao, the founder and MD of a company called Eco Coatings has come up with eco-friendly paper cups and paper plates that employ a water base, food grade, re-pulpable coating. His aim is to disrupt the market for plastic-coated paper items with his homegrown innovation. With a manufacturing unit based in Madhavaram, he is now embarking on technology transfer MoUs with various companies globally.

Speaking to this daily, the four-decade veteran of the packaging industry says, “I had set up and built my company close to eight years ago with bootstrapped funding and internal accruals amounting to about Rs 10 cr. Significant time was invested in R&D – formulating the coating that would make paper cups durable, waterproof, microwave-safe and completely biodegradable. The paper cups available in the market today are made with polyester-based materials, which are not food grade. The coating that we created needed to have an aroma and an oil & grease barrier to make the paper suitable for moulding into food trays and containers. Currently, our plant capacity is about 350 mt per month. Over the next six months, we intend to raise the capacity to 3,000 mt.”

Talking about the company’s technology transfer MoUs, Rao says, “The main chemical used in our coating is imported from Germany, so it’s essentially an Indo-German collaboration. We have already tied up with firms in Thailand, South Korea, Australia and Israel – in terms of technology transfer. We will be tying up with other states in India as well after we establish a solid presence in the South.”