Trash to treasure: How ReCircle cracked India’s waste management code
Mumbai-based waste management company ReCircle is in talks to raise Series A funding and is eyeing a revenue of over $23 million in the next three years.
In 2016, NASA published an image of a fire raging across the largest landfill in Mumbai, underscoring India’s escalating waste management crisis and sparking public concern and action.
Situated near Thane Creek, the Deonar dumping ground stretches across 326 acres, receiving over 3,700 metric tons of trash daily—nearly one-third of the city’s waste back then.
Amidst this, two NGO founders–Rahul Nainani and Gurashish Singh Sahni–realised the issue of a large amount of waste ending up in landfills. In 2016, they founded ReCircle to address the same.
Today, ReCircle–a data and supply chain company–is working on digitising India’s waste supply chain and monetising the data that flows through this supply chain.
How did it begin?
In 2015, Nainani and Sahni first met at a Google startup weekend and decided to start an NGO model to connect households in Deonar to institutions for waste collection. However, the Deonar fire in the following year led the founders to pivot to develop a system that focuses on diverting waste away from landfills and oceans.
“One of the things we found was that the average life expectancy of people living around the dumpsite (Deonar) was about 38-37 years of age. These people don’t work in the dumpsite but live in the penitentiary of the dumpsite itself. And that was a wake-up call–it is happening in the heart of the city, in Mumbai,” Nainani, CEO of ReCircle, tells YourStory.
“If it is affecting the people living around the dumpsite, how soon will it start affecting the rest of us?”–the duo were plagued by the question.
ReCircle started its operations under a business-to-consumer (B2C) model, but after three years, in 2019, the company realised it needed to procure larger volumes of waste to create an impact in the ecosystem and pivoted to a B2B model. “That is when we saw most of our growth come in,” he adds.
According to the co-founder, the waste management sector did not exist when the company was established–either for investors or customers. Initially, ReCircle struggled to convince people of the need for recycling.
Another challenge was to get the right team, as the co-founders did not have a background in the waste management sector prior to starting the company.
“It's kind of like a non-sexy business. You're not going to a tech startup that is growing and building something along those lines. So, finding the right team, getting the right people, building around that, and ensuring VCs see a bigger potential around that (was a challenge),” Nainani notes.
Business model
ClimaOne, ReCircle’s proprietary software, offers a reverse supply chain for plastic waste by connecting waste aggregators and collectors to recyclers and processors.
The platform enables the company to track and trace material that flows across this supply chain, giving it access to data ranging from where the waste was collected to how much was procured and what value it holds.
ReCircle sells this data to its clients, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Nestle, in the form of credits to meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals set by government regulatory bodies under the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) service.
The Mumbai-based company works with 400 collection partners across 250+ locations in India. As of March 2024, the company has recovered over 169,000 tonnes of waste in total through its supply chain. To put this into context, the co-founder says 169,000 tonnes is equivalent to the weight of over 28,166 full-grown elephants.
Additionally, it has partnered with local scrap dealers, adopting a similar model to cab aggregators, where the dealer earns a portion of the waste collected.
“We have collection partners that run their independent businesses, and we provide them with this platform to give an additional source of income and be part of our supply chain. We basically transact with them in terms of volumes that we need to collect from them,” Nainani explains.
The company offers another service to clients, called the Plastic Neutral Program, which targets micro and small enterprises exempted from EPR compliances and provides a voluntary credit mechanism to these companies.
In April, ReCircle started a new project, Project Extra Life, in Mumbai with Circular Apparel Innovation Factory to target textile waste, where it has a system to recover and collect old textile materials from households, offices, and fashion houses, among others.
The path forward
ReCircle aims to work towards ethical circularity and is recycling waste material by itself along with its partners to achieve the same.
Earlier in September, the startup raised an undisclosed investment in a bridge round co-led by Venture Catalysts, Mumbai Angels, and high-net-worth individuals (HNIs). At present, it is in discussions with investors to raise a Series A round.
“With their focus on working towards ethical circularity and plans to forward integrate into the plastic waste supply chain, the company will not only be able to provide high-quality, traceable recycled plastic content to companies using plastic packaging but also build a new revenue channel,” said Shalini Chhabra of 3i Partners.
3i Partners had invested in ReCircle’s pre-Series A funding round in 2023, along with Flipkart Ventures and Acumen Fund Inc.
“We are already collecting bottles for Coca-Cola, which we are sending for recycling. We intend to set up our own recycling plant with this fundraise, where we convert these recycled bottles into granules that can be used to make new bottles out of that ecosystem. So, our forward integration with the plastic supply chain is one we are looking at in terms of using our investment into setting up our own recycling unit,” Nainani says.
The company, which aims to begin its recycling unit by early next financial year, is also exploring export opportunities for plastic granules in the US, European, and Middle Eastern markets, where there is a bigger consumer awareness and demand for recycled material.
According to Mordor Intelligence, India’s waste management market size is estimated at $12.90 billion in 2024, expected to reach $13.30 billion by 2029, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 6.10% between 2024 and 2029.
Going forward, ReCircle aims to increase its revenue channel by selling recycled plastics to the same brand owners it currently collaborates with as a new source of revenue.
The company targets over $23 million in the next three years and has been cash flow positive since FY23. ReCircle is also targeting Rs 100 crore in revenue in FY25.
ReCircle was part of YourStory’s Tech30 list, which looked at India’s 30 most promising startups poised to become major disruptors across fields.
(The copy was updated with additional information.)
Edited by Suman Singh
