Kabadiwalla Connect: 'A Start-up way' of making money off recyclable waste!

Chennai metropolis generates over 5,000 metric tonnes of waste per day, most of which is dumped, without being segregated, into two landfills in Kodungaiyur and Perungudi. It's possible to reduce this by 70 per cent, says Siddharth Hande, provided every household in Chennai sells its recyclables to the local kabadiwallas and composts their organic waste at home.

Hande is the founder and CEO of Kabadiwalla Connect, a much-awarded start-up in the area of waste management and recycling. The company has an app, RecyKle, that connects scrap dealers — kabadiwallas — with consumers. So people can use the app to find kabadiwallas nearby, find out what scrap they deal in and even ask them to collect waste from their house. The app also provides information on how to manage waste responsibly at home – segregating, composting, etc.

Kabadiwallas and waste pickers, says Hande, play an important role in the ecosystem of handling recycled waste and help prevent at least one-third of all the recyclable waste generated in the city of Chennai from reaching the landfills through their informal networks connecting them with residents, commercial establishments and industries.

Kabadiwalla Connect began its journey in 2014 by mapping kabadiwallas in the city with the help of a grant it received from the World Economic Forum (WEF) worth CHF 50,000 (approximately Rs 33 lakh). Hande, who used to organise clean-up drives on Chennai beaches along with his friends in college, had come up with the idea. "We realised very quickly that we are just moving waste from one place to another and not attacking the root of the problem. After we had cleaned up the beaches, we saw the waste pickers come in and pick up the materials that had value. In 2014, I got a grant from WEF to conduct a detailed research in the area. That's how Kabadiwalla Connect was born," he explains.

"Kabadiwalla Connect uses ICT to solve gaps in the waste ecosystem. Using technology, we try to leverage the informal waste ecosystem and help divert waste from the landfill. But for us, it is not just about the environment. We also have in mind the social angle — working with an extremely marginalised community — the kabadiwallas," says Hande.

Kabadiwalla Connect also operates India's first smart materials recovery facility (MRF) at Puzhal in Chennai. Currently, the facility handles PET bottles, but says Ganesh Kumar Subramanian, technology leader of Kabadiwalla Connect, there are plans to expand the business by recycling all types of plastics. At the MRF plant, the PET bottles collected from kabadiwallas are shredded into pieces after their labels and caps have been removed. These pieces are then sold to fabric manufacturers, explains Subramanian. "Since we began our operation, we have prevented 1.25 lakh kilo of PET bottles from entering into our landfills," he adds.

Kabadiwalla Connect's expansion plans have been fuelled by the funding it received from a World Bank project in March this year — an award of $200,000 (approximately Rs 1.3 crore) from the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data given for how it has created "a framework for cities in low- and middle-income countries to manage waste more effectively by collaborating with the informal recycling sector — the kabadiwallas".

It's the latest in a series of awards that have come Kabadiwalla Connect's way of late — one of six innovators chosen for the Launch Nordic 2016 award in December 1, 2016; finalists in the 'Innovation Global South Award' category at the World Smart City Awards 2016 in November 16, 2016; the MIT Climate CoLab award in 'waste management' in September, 2016.

Clearly, Hande is on to a good thing.