Things Made From Areca Leaf
Menu card and plates made from areca leaf. Its presence in weddings and picnics is becoming inevitable. It is friendly, and its uses are known globally. It has found its space in almost all departmental stores. Areca leaf plates and cups, which are eco-friendly, are available in different sizes and forms now and are made at a number of small-scale units in this region. But, what many of us do not know is that these leaves can also be used to make value added products such as menu, visiting and greeting cards, gift articles and table products. The Magnus, producers of areca leaf plates and plate making machinery here, plan to launch next month such value-added products made out of areca leaf. “We wanted to venture into an eco-friendly project and hence finalised on the areca leaf. From the beginning we wanted to do something different. We have been making plates and cups for nearly five years for the domestic market and now we plan to launch value-added products,” says C. Nanda Kumar of The Magnus. Apart from cleaning, there is no major processing to make plates and cups from the areca leaves. In the case of the cards, dyes will be used on the alphabet, he says.
The company is also exporting some of its products to the U.S. and France. It makes machines to produce the plates and cups and has recently come out with automatic machines. “We have so far supplied about 400 manual machines and 10 automatic ones,” he says. While the manual machines can make 250 to 300 plates in eight hours, the automatic one can do 500 plates. It can make the value-added products, he says.
