Integrated plant making value added banana products to come up

Under a pioneer project, banana trunk will be used to make fabrics, acoustic panels and bio-fertiliser

Chennai: A first-of-its-kind in India, an integrated project to make value-added products out of banana stem has started taking shape in Maharashtra with allotment of about 57 acres in Jalgaon district, said officials associated with the project.The project is to process the banana trunk or pseudo-stem to make fibre yarn, sap water and other products.

“We will extract banana fibre, liquid nutrients, products for bio-gas, acoustic materials and stem powder. Presently the plan is to use G9 banana variety as it gives 1 per cent fibre,” said Vinay Gupta, chief executive officer, Gencrest.

Presently, the banana growers are having disposal problems with the pseudo-stem and incurring heavy expenditure on the disposal without getting any income.”Banana crops can become like sugarcane in terms of byproducts-fibre yarn for textiles, sap for nutraceuticals and fertiliser, balance waste for acoustic panels and bio-fertiliser,” said Annadurai, former space scientist now heading Vice President, Tamil Nadu State Council for Science and Technology, Chennai and Chairman, National Design and Research Forum, Bengaluru.

One of the problems in utilizing the full potential of the banana plantation is the absence of an automatic plant to process the trunk.There are small manually operated machines that extract banana fibre to make products like textiles and other handicrafts.

To solve the problem, the faculty and students of the Kancheepuram based Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing IIITDM have designed and built an integrated machine that can peel, press and extract banana fibre from the pseudo-stem.
In the process the machine also separates the core stem that can be processed as ingredients for making biscuits, ice cream and others.