
During his daily bus commute in the bustling Indian city of Hyderabad, there was something that really bothered Narayana Peesapaty.
"Everybody was eating something on their way to work," says Peesapaty, who was working as a sustainable farming researcher for a nonprofit organization at the time. But it wasn't his fellow bus riders' snacking habits that troubled him. It was their plastic cutlery.
Every day, he'd see hundreds of people chuck their plastic spoons and forks in the garbage. Grasping the scale of this problem, Peesapaty had an epiphany: "What if we could actually eat the cutlery, instead of throwing them away?"