Ep 18 – Green Talks with Panchtatwa Girl Ft. Krishnan Subramanian from Yellow Bag foundation

Just get a bag and drop a dream in it, and you’ll be surprised what happens. Charles Nelson Reilly  

We all know cloth bags come with a lot of advantages  (i) Cloth bags are biodegradable so they do not pollute the environment. (ii) Cloth bags are capable of carrying more things. (iii) We can reuse them over and over again.
Well, today I have with me someone who with his partner quit their jobs to return to Madurai and start an eco-friendly venture called the yellow bag. 

Yellow bag

Krishnan and Gowri have started a yellow bag foundation that sells traditional Manja Pai or yellow bags to encourage people to switch to cloth bags. You can read more about their initiative on their site –  https://theyellowbag.org/ With a wonderful mantra on their site that says – that they are building your product for a better world. You take conscious steps causing no harm to the planet & people. And they consider business a tool to create a fair & equal society.  

The name YellowBag has been inspired by Manjappai (which means a yellow-colored cloth bag), which has always been an integral part of Tamil culture. Krishnan says he has many memories associated with the bags while growing up in Madurai, where carrying them around was commonplace. From buying groceries or vegetables to carrying essentials or as wedding gifts, we can use “Manjappai everywhere. It holds great significance in every household in Tamil Nadu. The yellow bag team sees this as the right time to scale up their work to create a bigger impact across urban slums in Madurai & beyond. 

Education and Empowerment with Yellow Bag

The yellow bag has a pioneering program for children to help the child develop the innate confidence to neither fight nor take flight but face the reality around him/her. The yellow bag team strengthens them to make effective decisions to give them meaningful experiences grounded in reality. Children are open to 8 different multiple intelligence areas, as proposed by Howard Gardner,1983.  Not just this, the initiative has turned into a full-fledged social enterprise based out of Madurai. The venture produces cloth bags while empowering hundreds of marginalized women through sustainable employment. YellowBag Foundation believes that the economic empowerment of women is a springboard for social empowerment.  So yellow bag focuses on women’s welfare projects like subsidized community shops, health funds, and sanitation facilities. You can volunteer and connect with them – at connect@theyellowbag.org

Products

The yellow bag offers Eco-friendly cloth bags and wedding thamboolam favor bags with attractive designs. Currently, YellowBag offers packaging bags, garment protector bags, totes, and drawstring bags.m Their products start from Rs 20 and go up to Rs 200. They use cotton and jute to make bags.  When a reusable bag is made from materials like jute, cotton, or bamboo, the environment reaps the benefits. These are renewable materials that have a quick growth rate, so the harvest of plants and new crops plantation happens in quick succession. Cloth bags, because of their reusable nature, help reduce the amount of single-use plastic being used and inadvertently discarded into the environment. Cloth bags are also multipurpose, which means that you could reduce your plastic use in many areas of your life.

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More on Green talks-

In the light of, eco-friendly talks do listen to other episodes of Green Talks. Try and bring that one change in your life towards a greener tomorrow. Episode 1 – Eco-travel Ep 3 – Know Your plastic Episode 4 – Rainwater harvesting and manure water

In addition, You can even listen to the episode on my podcast site praguntatwa talks, and leave your comments on what you liked in this episode. Along with Eco-friendly talks, I even like to share Positive stories of people bringing a beautiful change to this world. Do read these stories here. You can also listen to it on my podcast site – Praguntatwa talks.