Grass and Coconut Stick Broom

Details

The two brooms an Indian home actually needs. The soft one is broom grass, Thysanolaena maxima, the phool jhadu, bound at three points and set into a solid bamboo handle. The hard one is coconut leaf midrib, Cocos nucifera, for the terrace, the courtyard and a wet floor. Both are exactly what they have always been, and the reason to say so on a page is that they are increasingly not. Dyed polypropylene filament is cut and bundled to look like grass, and it is cheaper, and once it is in a bundle you cannot tell by eye: the tell is that it does not shed, does not soften and does not compost, and it sends plastic filament into the drain for its whole life. The handle is the second substitution, a hollow PVC tube printed with a bamboo grain, which cracks at the collar where the head is bound because there is nothing solid for the binding to bite into. The third is the one nobody thinks about at all. A painted handle is a painted product, and the Regulation of Lead Contents in Household and Decorative Paints Rules, 2016 caps lead at 90 ppm of the dried film, which is a rule that gets tested on wall paint and essentially never on a broom. These handles are not painted. They are sanded and waxed, so there is no film to worry about and nothing to test.

• Soft head is Thysanolaena maxima broom grass, confirmed as plant fibre by microscopy, never polypropylene filament
• Hard head is coconut leaf midrib, Cocos nucifera
• Solid bamboo handle, Dendrocalamus strictus, sanded and waxed. Not painted, not printed, and not a PVC tube
• Bound at three points with cane and wire on the soft broom, so a local broom maker can rebind the head instead of you buying a whole broom
• Soft: 120 cm overall, 420 g. Hard: 105 cm overall, 560 g
• Fully compostable at the end of life, handle included, because there is no plastic and no paint film in it
• It sheds grass for the first week. All grass brooms do, and one that does not is not grass
• About a year of daily sweeping for the soft broom, longer if it is hung rather than stood on its bristles
• The soft broom is for dry indoor floors only. Grass rots if it is used wet, and that is what the coconut one is for