Every harvest season, mountains of rice husk pile up outside mills across India. Often labelled ‘waste’, they are discarded or burned, adding to the smoke that blankets parts of the country. BL Bengani saw an opportunity to turn this problem into a solution. Founding Indowud NFC, a Chennai-based brand, he helped convert rice husk into engineered boards that could replace conventional plywood.
From across 110 rice mills in and around the city, unprocessed rice husk is tied and loaded onto heavy vehicles to begin an expedition to Sholavaram, on the northern outskirts of Chennai. The agricultural residue goes through stages of cleaning and size reduction, gets blended with a binder system, compressed under heat and pressure, cured, trimmed to size, and finished into engineered boards that can be cut, drilled, routed, screwed, nailed, painted, laminated, veneered, wallpapered, and even carved into intricate architectural screens.
Bengani spent nearly two years travelling across the USA and Singapore, studying alternative materials before returning to rice husk. Finally, he reached this breakthrough — turning a natural resource into a durable, eco-friendly alternative to conventional plywood and timber-based building materials. “Scientists in the USA and Singapore helped develop an innovation. With them, it was easy to work on an imaginary thing that never existed earlier. Both markets gave me access to manufacturing and machinery expertise that simply didn’t exist in India yet,” explains the founder and chairman of Indowud NFC.
What to expect
From its establishment in 2018, Indowud has expanded beyond simple boards to door frames, wall panels, furniture components, decking, ready-to-fix cladding, pergolas, louvres and custom CNC-routed jaalis made to architects’ specifications. Today, the company’s products are exported to 10 to 15 countries through a network of more than 100 dealers.
The boards are designed to resist water, termites, and fire while remaining virtually zero-VOC (volatile organic compounds). Unlike many conventional engineered wood products that rely on formaldehyde-based adhesives, Indowud team claims its boards contain no formalin. “You’re not breathing formaldehyde off-gassing every time a room heats up. The board is flame retardant. It’s self-extinguishing; take the ignition source away, and it stops burning rather than continuing to smoulder,” asserts Bengani.
This property came as a blessing in disguise. Bengani recalls, “We set out to solve termites and formaldehyde. The fire performance turning out to be one of the strongest properties of the board, almost as a by-product of getting the husk-to-binder chemistry right, was the surprise of the whole process.”
These developments — making a strong case for the product to be specified in projects — convinced architects, who were already searching for greener materials long before Indowud entered the market. “It translates into real demand for certified, green products for their projects. It wasn’t just us insisting the world needed a sustainable alternative to plywood; architects were already looking for exactly that, with certification requirements to match,” he points out.
Architects, builders, and the industry must note that the product is not positioned as a budget alternative, and not pitched as a premium markup either; it is priced comparably to the best quality plywood available in the market.
Driving strategic remediation
The environmental argument extends beyond replacing timber. Bengani believes agricultural waste should become a resource rather than a liability. “Our long-term vision is to make farm-to-building materials the new standard for the construction industry, in India and globally. We want architects and builders everywhere to think of agricultural residue not as waste to be burnt, but as the raw material for the next generation of safe, durable, and sustainable building products,” he explains.
Projecting the impact and the hold the company has on the market in numbers, third-party carbon assessments estimate that every cubic metre of its engineered boards avoids around 2,447 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent through avoided deforestation.
For now, rice husk remains the primary ingredient, largely because of its availability around Chennai and its performance characteristics. But Bengani doesn’t see it as the only possibility. He says, “There’s a long list of residues that get burned or discarded every year across Indian agriculture, and each one is a potential raw material nobody has fully unlocked yet. Rice husk was our starting point because of how well the fibre performed once we cracked the right binder chemistry.”
In a country where crop residue is often associated with smoke-filled skies, Indowud is betting that the same material can instead become part of homes, offices, and buildings designed to last for generations.