Jinali Mody of India received the UNEP Young Champions of the Earth Award, 2025

Jinali Mody of India has been honored with the 2025 Young Champion of the Earth Award by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Planet A. She has carried out the innovative work of converting banana stems into Banofi leather, a sustainable plant-based alternative to traditional leather.

• Jinali Mody of Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, has been honored with the 2025 Young Champion of the Earth Award by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Planet A. She has carried out the innovative work of converting banana stems into Banofi leather, a sustainable plant-based alternative to traditional leather.
• This award provides funding, mentorship, and global recognition to help advance the bold ideas of young environmental innovators. A graduate in Biochemistry from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and holder of a Master’s degree from Yale School of Environment, Mody is the founder and CEO of Banofi Leather.

Banofi Leather

• Her India-based, women-led startup aims to revolutionize the fast fashion industry by creating leather alternatives from banana crop waste. Compared to traditional leather, Banofi significantly reduces water use, toxic waste, and CO₂ emissions.
• Banofi leather is made by blending banana stem fibers with natural binders and starch, creating a material that looks, feels, and even smells like animal leather.
• This production process reduces water usage by up to 95 percent, lowers carbon emissions by more than 90 percent, and eliminates toxic waste.
• 60 percent of the company’s team are women, and it partners with about 100 small banana farmers, providing them with additional income from stems that would otherwise be burned or left to rot.
• She has won the 2023 Hult Prize of 1 million US dollars, the Sustainable Material of the Year Award in India, and the WEGE Prize. She has also been recognized by the World Economic Forum and supported by the MIT Climate and Energy Prize.

Other winners

• Joseph Nguthiru (Kenya) – Founder of Hyapak: converts invasive water hyacinth into biodegradable packaging and seedling wrappers, reducing the use of single-use plastics.
• Noemi Florea (USA) – Founder of Cyclo: developed a compact greywater reuse system for homes, turning wastewater into drinking water with low energy consumption.

Young Champions of the Earth initiative

• is UNEP’s flagship youth engagement program that honors ambitious young innovators worldwide with outstanding ideas to protect and restore the environment.
• Established in 2017, it will be relaunched in 2025 in partnership with Planet A (founded by US cleantech CEO Chris Kemper).
• UNEP’s flagship youth engagement award honors young entrepreneurs under 30 with bold environmental solutions.
• Winners will receive seed funding of 20,000 US dollars, intensive training, tailored mentorship, global recognition, and access to Planet A’s offer of further funding (up to 1 million US dollars).

India’s Vikas Kumar and Sarthak Mittal received the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize for Engineering Design

• At the 2025 ceremony held virtually from Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre,
• two Indian engineers won the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize for designing a shoe rack equipped with UV lamps to tackle foul odor, a unique science award.
• Assistant Professor Vikas Kumar at Shiv Nadar University and his student researcher Sarthak Mittal, currently working at Newgen Software, designed racks with UV lamps that neutralize bacteria – the real cause of shoe odor.
• Ig Nobel Prizes are unique science awards that honor research which first makes people laugh and then makes them think. This year’s winners included pizza-loving lizards, zebra-striped cows, and UV shoe racks.

Ig Nobel Prize

• First awarded in 1991 by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels celebrate achievements that “make people laugh, then make them think.”
• Winners are announced each year in Boston, where a unique ceremony includes paper airplanes, mini operas, and real Nobel laureates presenting the prizes.