Purushothaman Cannane (Purush) creatively combined his engineering skill, passion for solving environmental problems, and his drive to help vulnerable communities when he founded Greenii to create paper bags from clean waste papers such as newsprints, magazines, flyers, and brochures. Avoiding post-consumer paper in order to bypass the need for additional environmentally unfriendly chemicals and processes, he sources high-quality paper wastes from libraries, corporate offices, paper mills, flyer distributors, universities, and printing presses, offers employment to recently immigrated women or refugees, and has now sold thousands of carrier bags in Canada and the USA to replace single-use plastic bags.
Not stopping yet, Purush has gone on to invent equipment (Semi-automatic assembly, first in the world to swiftly process newsprints, and magazines into paper bags) to facilitate growth in production volumes, and is expanding into box packaging as well. While handmade bags may continue to form a part of the product offering, it is the raw materials used that ensure bags will always remain unique. He even affords customers the opportunity to convert their unused, expired marketing materials and paper products into new packaging products for use by themselves or another environmentally conscious and creative business.
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