Make Wealth From Waste

We live in a society where greed has surpassed all limits today, and man has become so selfish that he blindly plunders the resources of nature. We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment and keeping that in mind, we have the new age alchemists who are trying their best to save the environment and prevent devastation in the best way possible. These startups are using simple but effective ways to make this place a better place.

Paaduks: Making eco-friendly footwear

This company is inspired by a US-based firm that makes shoes with soles of old used tyres. Their priority was to redress the issues of the cobblers who were reeling under debt cycles and were often exploited by retailers and wholesalers. These producers and retailers required them to invest in the production, paid them the meager amount for all the hardships, and often delayed payments as well. Paaduks aims to have a prosperous cobbler community.

They started off in 2013, when after having faced rejections from various cobblers, one agreed to work on the lines of their idea. The soles of this company’s shoes are made up of not only discarded old tyres but also natural fabric like cotton, canvas, jute, and other vegan material. They use natural Indian prints like kalamkari, ikat, ajrak, indigo and so on, that lend a rich ethnic look to their shoes. They shifted from sandals to shoes based on consumer demand and now they even make shoes for men.

Currently, they are being supported by the incubation program at UnLtd India and will look for investors in the future. Hence, they are doing their bit to save the environment and are trying to strap from scrap.

Arora Fibres: Polyester fibres

Thinking about what to do with the plastic bottles that have piled up in your kitchen? Don’t worry, Mr.Rupinder Singh Arora has a cure. Since 1944 Arora Fibers Ltd, has been recycling discarded plastic bottles to make polyester staple fabric. Conversion of PET i.e. polyethylene terephthalate into polyester fabric has a huge positive impact on the environment. And for Mr Singh, who started the company due to the colossal harm caused to the environment by burning plastic, the positive impact is more important than the commercial interest. The environmental benefit of recycling discarded plastic bottles is enormous. By recycling 10 billion PET bottles, one can save one million square yards of landfill space and eliminate 0.25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

This technology was brought to India after typing up with a Korean company Mijung, which specialised in converting PET bottles into polyester yarn. His factory that has the capacity to process 18,000 tonnes of plastic a year and that he plans to increase to 48,000 tonnes by next year is in the belt of Silvassa in Dadra & Nagar Haveli

Profit has been extremely profitable to this industry as the company generated Rs 9.6 crore in 1994 and set up the Silvassa plant and logged Rs 34 crore in revenues in the financial year that ended March 2013. The company aims to touch Rs 75 crore this year.

The polyester fibre has a huge demand in many industries like automobiles and is also used as packaging material for beverages, food products, pharmaceuticals, and consumer and industrial products. Today there are about 20 companies have followed this idea of Mr.Arora and convert nearly 300,000 tonnes of PET bottles into polyester fibre each year.

Cerebra

How many phones have you changed till date? How many gadgets have you replaced in your house? Have you ever wondered where do they go? What happens to them? They are a part of our e-waste and Cerebra Integrated Technologies, One Bangalore-based InfoTech Company is doing its best to reduce the plenitude of e-waste, reported to be the most dangerous waste. This company is building India’s largest e-waste recycling plant that will begin operations by the end of this year and will be able to process almost 90,000 tonnes of waste.

In the quest of finding a solution to this problem they found their treasure trove of wealth as e-waste also has precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum, etc, which are used in the production of various gadgets. Thus, they plan to make millions out of waste.

Wabag : making liquid gold

In a country like ours where acute water shortage is a situation that though most of us as city dwellers haven’t experienced but we all are familiar with. Water is indeed the liquid gold today. Sometimes people hyperbolize this and say the world might plunge into a 3rd world war for water, water is so precious and the Chennai-based Water technology company VA Tech Wabag would certainly agree. They recycle industrial and municipal waste water either for reuse as drinking water or to plough back for industrial use.

Executive Director Amit Sengupta says 15 percent of the company’s revenues come from recycling and expects it to rise to 50%by next year. The company recorded revenues of Rs 1,000 crore in India, Last year.

Wabag will build an effluent treatment plant with recycling facilities for Reliance Industries’ purified terephthalic acid plant in Dahej and a tertiary treatment plant for the Reliance petrochemicals complex at Hazira.

Water is as important as any other resource and people need to understand its worth as it’s scarce and people wouldn’t understand its price unless they pay a price.

Microqual

We curse our mobile network for dropped calls, but next time when you head to Lonavla for a weekend and don’t experience any dropped calls on your cell phone along the Mumbai-Pune express highway, thank Mahesh Choudhary, the CEO of Microqual Techno. This telecom infrastructure services company has tied up with Mumbai-based outdoor advertising company Guju Ads and uses its 1,000 billboards and hoardings across 13 cities as telecom tower sites. This, in turn, helps bring down CapEx by 30 per cent and operational costs by 40 percent. Microqual is thus trying to connect people by using power transmission towers as telecom towers. the company is also capturing power that is lost during transmission and distribution to supply electricity to the telecom towers.

The journey to turn idle or waste resources into wealth started three years ago in Kerala when a mobile services company Aircel wanted to set up telecom towers but found it difficult to operate within the cost it had estimated. Microqual has exclusive rights for 10 years to use 85,000 Power Grid Corp of India transmission towers across Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab.

Microqual cuts fuel expenses by 40 percent by using a combination of solar and wind power to operate the telecom tower site. The innovation is paying off: the company posted Rs 600 crore in revenues last year.

So if you want to startup and you need inspiration, go pro-environment and make this place a better place to live in.

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