In our constant quest to bring to the forefront and highlight sustainable endeavors and eco-friendly initiatives in music and music festivals, we’ve stumbled upon one such individual who seeks to alter the framework of headphones. We caught up with Mumbai-based industrial designer Aakansh Chaturvedi, who created ‘Bambass,’ an eco-friendly, over-the-head earphone using the fast-growing and highly sustainable bamboo plant.
Living in an era where daily household products such as toothbrushes and hair combs prepared from bamboo material are readily available, eco-warrior Aakansh Chaturvedi seeks to go a step further by crafting sustainable headphones for the masses. “My reason to develop these headphones was to use a greener alternative instead of plastic for modern-day products,” cites Aakansh as the motivation behind assembling this listening device.
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On Bambass, Aakansh’s choice of music is Indian classical music, Hindi music, and musicians Prateek Kuhad and Ed Sheeran. Chaturvedi assembled the headphones during the latter stages of his post-graduation studies in industrial design. Linking his passion for technology and green practices, Aakansh decided on bamboo as his core material due to its sustainable nature, uniqueness, and versatility. He says, “After all the research, I realized that Bamboo is very useful and a perfect fit for this particular kind of product because it is flexible, it has good strength, you can shape it in any form, and has good durability.”
Supported by his institute, the entire process of research, design, and implementation took Aakansh three months to get the product to a functional state. When asked why he chose headphones as a product, he responds by saying, “In gadgets, I wanted to choose a particular kind of product that is used across different age groups; headphones are used by all ages, kids and adults, so I wanted to choose gadgets like that.”
As for taking Bambass to market, scaling the product, and making it more affordable to audiophiles, Aakansh says there is a lot that he has to figure out. “It is not simply a static product; it has electronics involved in it.” He adds, “I am trying to see what manufacturing process can catalyze the speed of making this product so that more and more people can buy this product at a cheaper rate.”
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We wrapped up our conversation with Aakansh making an earnest appeal to the populace, urging us all to use more sustainable products and the manufacturers to make these products more affordable to all. “Plastic has taken over the world very rapidly, and now we are suffering if we have more products like this, not with just bamboo but more composite materials that are more biodegradable. If the industry has more options for using biodegradable material, then it will be easier to get rid of this plastic problem.”
Find Aakansh Chaturvedi on: Instagram
