The stakes are high, the urgency palpable. India needs a last-ditch effort to rewrite its destiny—or have its metropolises drown in cyclone waters. “The tragic narrative of Chennai and Mumbai’s inundation could have been avoided if only we had a better plastic pollution management system,” says Abhay Deshpande, founder and CEO of ReCykal, a Hyderabad-based cleantech startup that provides digital solutions to waste management. His resolution this year is to reclaim 70,000 metric tonne of ocean-bound plastic in India. “It’s time for another Samudramanthan (churning of the ocean), the world’s biggest ocean-bound plastic churning initiative to save the cities,” says the 52-year-old.
The idea germinated when Deshpande came up with a plan for waste management in the mountains of Kedarnath in May 2022. Swamped with visitors, the pilgrimage site was littered with plastic. The waste generation per day doubled from 5,000 kg in 2019 to 10,000 kg in 2022. Deshpande and his team came up with the Deposit Refund System, an incentive that motivates consumers to bring back their waste for a refundable deposit. A simple Rs 10 back for a bottle returned worked wonders. “By placing a value on the waste, we’re enabling efficient and increased material recovery. We could collect eight lakh bottles in 2022 alone,” he says.
A serial entrepreneur with startups such as the e-commerce platform malamall.com and fin-tech startup Zaggle under his belt, Deshpande was keen on starting a company to make an impact on society. “Most of the work in the environment or sustainability sector is done by NGOs that work on funds from corporations. It is a model that may not sustain itself. That is why ReCykal is and will be a proud ‘for-profit’ company,” he adds.
Touted as the Uber of waste management, ReCykal works alongside local ragpickers by providing them with access to a comprehensive network of recyclers across India. “We have created the entire supply chain platform. This offers financial security to the ragpickers, or ‘micro-entrepreneurs’ as we would like to call them, while enabling them to expand their income by adding categories of plastic waste to their portfolio through specialised training provided by us,” he explains.
The company brings the collectors, aggregators and recyclers to a B2B marketplace anywhere in India. So now, an aggregator in Chennai can send his truck to a recycler in Surat because the flood-affected Chennai market is still not up and about. As a result, their income has significantly increased. Little wonder that it’s a win-win situation for all.