Environmental awareness

My name is Trisha Rahman and I run the company Planticum. I was born in Sweden and from an early age became interested in cultivation and the plant kingdom. After high school I chose to study medicine but it was the wrong subject for me when I realized that I only learned to find temporary drugs for various diseases. I wanted more than that, I wanted to know the real cause of diseases and why we humans suffer from it. Is it genetic or is it due to our daily and learned habits that we take on diseases.

Almost everyone in my family from my dad's side have diabetes and I could not accept that one day I would get it too. My life consisted of worrying about myfuture and how to prevent getting sick. When I did some google searches and saw various documentaries in this area, I foundhope. I wanted to get rid of all my allergies I was suffering from, no doctor could help me get rid of it, and no one could answer what exactly the allergy was triggered by. I had a lot of questions no one could answer. So I took it in my own hand, Istarted to study biology/botany at University of Lund and that's where my journey began.

I stopped eating meat and dairy and replaced everything with aplantbased diet, 3 weeks of green smoothies only made me reduce all allergies and 12 weeks later I had no allergies at all. My iron level went from 6 to 11. I was full of energy, that was also one of my concerns. Why children have so much energy and adults get exhausted after a day at work. I used to feel sleepy after every meal and struggled through the day, always tired. Coffee and energy drinks held me up. But when I changed my eating habits it all turned, every meal gave me energy and I could work to late night without feeling tired at all!

I started tocultivate my own vegetables andate as clean as possible. All meat consumption not only makes us sick, it makes the whole planet sick. The earth is acidified and all fruits and vegetables does not have the nutrients it should. So what to do? How can I change that?

How could I convince my family to stop eating meat in order toimprove their health? Especially my father. He only noticed me loosing weight and was concerned I didnt eat anything he cooked even though I told him about my iron level which I suffered from my whole life!

I wanted to tell the whole world about the key to prosperity.

I started building different environments in small glass bottles at home. Planted plants in different types of soil and my home was filled with bottles. Every time I was visited by my family, they were amazed at how many bottles there were everywhere, at that time I was studying Pedology, soil science. My husband was tired of seeing the chaos at home of all my experiments.I started a fundraiser of SEK 50,000 and the demand was great for my ecosystems that I created.With successful fundraising, I took the money and went to Bangladesh where my fatheris bornand where I visited several times as a child and saw the enormous poverty. Idistributed plantbasedfood and school books for the village children and gave lectures in different schools on how much nutrition there was in the food they received compared to meat and how much carbon dioxide is released by slaughtered animals.Through this I was contacted by Shykh Seraj, who is a well known journalist in agriculture in Bangladesh and runs the big news channel Channel I. I got to tell him about my product and he was fascinated by my ecosystems and my thoughts behind it. My words spread in the news and I was happy to share my knowledge about health on TV.To this day, many have changed their eating habits in the village and improved their health. Mylong-term goal is to open an orphanage there to raise strong healthy children and make the country better.

Back in Sweden after 3 weeks in Bangladesh, and this time as a registered company and sales on top of my ecosystems. I had managed to come up with a soil mixture that worked well in the closed system. I was interviewed by different journalists and articles were published around Stockholm city, my product was a much appreciated craft.

Now I am in Dubai to convey a message with my craft, want to make Dubai a little greener. I run this company myself and hope for good sales so that I can get started with the orphanage construction but first invest in my company and create a team to increase the production.

Every detail on my product has a meaning. I use jute string on the neck of the bottle, the jute material is from Bangladesh and it supports local farmers.The glassware is an old-fashioned laboratory vase that was used for various chemical reactions back in the days and is unique in itself. They are handblown andmoulded in France, made out of recycled glass.

It takes about 4-5 days tobuild an ecosystem and each component is carefully planted, the slightest mistake causes of the cycle crashing. Making these has made me much more sharp and focused as a person since I am very present when I create. Delivering my product makes me proud and happy because I can stand behind the quality of it.