Probiotic approach to removing drain blockages
One of the recipients of the CavinKare Chinnikrishnan Innovation Awards 2013 was Dr S. Sivaram Pillai, CEO of ProKlean Technologies P Ltd, a company that offers probiotic technology products, and environmentally safe and sustainable solutions for industrial and consumer requirements. “We work with probiotic microorganisms and harness their potential to produce certain class of compounds and formulate products therefrom to replace chemicals from certain industries,” says Pillai, during a brief interaction with YourStory. “Right now, we are focusing on leather processing, textile processing, and hospitality industry, basically cleaning products for removing blockages in drain pipes. The uniqueness is that it is based on natural resources, completely biodegradable, non-toxic, and working as good as the chemicals, while being competitively priced.”
Though currently focusing on these three industries, Pillai believes that the technology platform of ProKlean can be used for many other applications. “We will use the guidance and expertise in CavinKare, and we will invest more in research marketing. We want to grow and become a very large company and at the same time do good to the world,” he adds.
Probiotics
For starters, probiotics are live microorganisms (in most cases, bacteria) that are similar to beneficial microorganisms found in the human gut, as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine explains. “They are also called ‘friendly bacteria’ or ‘good bacteria.’ Probiotics are available to consumers mainly in the form of dietary supplements and foods.” Tracing that the word probiotics is from pro and biota, meaning ‘for life,’ Harvard Health informs that Northern Europeans consume a lot of these beneficial microorganisms because of their tradition of eating foods fermented with bacteria, such as yogurt; and that probiotic-laced beverages are also big business in Japan. Though much of the latest news about probiotics is about diet, you would find an occasional story on industrial applications, such as a probiotic approach for cleaning up plumbing, the domain ProKlean operates in.
