Used Plastic Based Mulching System

Polythene mulches have been practiced for soil solarisation and found superior over other types of mulches, but plastics does create environmental problems. On the other hand, due to extensive and widespread applications of plastic in all walks of life, every day tons of plastic waste is produced. There is an urgent need to arrest expansion of plastic by means of Refuse or Reduce or Reuse or Recycle. What every individual can do is refuse, reduce and reuse. With refuse and reduce, the technology will be overlooked so the benefits will also be reduced. Hence, one of the solutions is reuse. Therefore, comparison was made among the eight different types of mulching condition. From this study, it was found that during forenoon soil temperature increases with increasing soil depth but in afternoon the trend was vice-versa. Also, concluded that the performance of used plastic bags as mulch is closer to BPM for getting higher production. In Rabi season under rabi onion crop, mulching roll can be prepared from used rice bags, cement bags, wheat flour bag etc. which are available with the farmers in plenty and can be reused as low cost mulching material satisfactorily by marginal farmers.