These startups rethink 'circularity' to stop waste from ending up in landfills

Bengaluru: Little over a year ago, when Steer World unveiled a technology to create sustainable alernative to wood at KPLEX 2024, a polymer exhibition held in Bengaluru, it was not exactly perfect.

This man-made "wood", made by compacting granules that were obtained by shredding plastic waste — those pesky hard-to-recycle plastic wrappers that litter every corner of India— was coarse to touch, not particularly appealing to the eye.

In less than a year, startup unWOOD has ticked off the aesthetics box too, by fine tuning their proprietary Macro Molecular Fiber Matrix process that mimics the strength, look, and feel of hardwood.

You need to really get close now to the improved version of unWOOD to tell it apart from wood.

Babu Padmanaban, Founder of Steer World, said every one kg of unWOOD prevents 1.5 kg of CO2 emissions polluting our air and recycles 500gm of plastic waste.

“Of course, there is that fully grown tree that need not sacrifice itself to become your chair or bed,” Vishal Mehta, Co-founder and CEO of unWOOD told PTI.

The sustainable brand hit another milestone 10 days ago when it became one of the eight transformative startups that won the newly launched Circular Economy Catalytic Grant of Climate KIC, a European climate innovation agency that is looking at the circular economy in India through the lens of entrepreneurship.

“Early-stage ventures often struggle to access capital, limiting their ability to scale. The grant aims to change that. Alongside funding, we help to connect these ventures with local industry and ecosystem,” Bjarke Kovshøj, Strategic Programmes Manager, Climate KIC, told PTI.

Launched in March 2025, the programme will support eight ventures with up to18,000 US Dollar each in equity-free, milestone-based funding, added Kovshøj.

“One of the things that Climate KIC paid attention to while choosing these startups is upstream innovation, which aims at eliminating waste at source,” said Kovshøj.

Bengaluru-based bootstrapped venture Green Goobe is a case in point. Ramya B S, Founder, admits as ideas go, hers is not probably much different from other environmentally safe cleaning products.

Where she differs from the rest -- and possibly why her company could have won the award -- is in how she packages and markets the product.

The avid bird watcher and environmental activist has walked the talk by choosing to stay sustainable all the way through. Her products come packaged in reused medicine bottles, gin bottles, plastic jerry cans and even the environmental nightmare, pet bottles.

Just by salvaging pet bottles and mineral water cans, Ramya said her company must have saved around 1,000kg of plastic from hitting landfills since they launched in November 2023.

“So, in effect, we are helping to divert the waste away from the landfills by using what is already there,” said Ramya to PTI.

Ramya has also taken ‘upstream innovation’ quite seriously. Her proprietary formula is so safe that people can reuse laundry discharge, for instance, to wash the car or even water the plants.

“This is something that we promote very aggressively. The cleaners are lab tested safe and discharge can be used for multiple purposes, conserving water,” said Ramya.

Climate KIC grant, said Ramya, who runs the company single handedly, came as a huge validation, because her friends and acquaintances often wrote her off by saying she will not be able sustain such a business model.

“Even more than the money, it's the fact that they believed in the transformative power of an idea like this that matters,” added Ramya.

For IIT Madras graduate Nikhil Kumar Panchal, Co-founder & CEO of Green Aadhaar — a software ecosystem for the waste management sector — Climate KIC’s network events for the winners are a win-win.

“We cater to everyone — from collection, transportation to processing and I met a lot of people in these network events who could basically be our customers,” said Panchal.

In a world that discards clothes faster than one can blink, textile waste is another nightmare for waste management. To tackle this, Vijaya Krishnappa has come up with a device that could help cloth be converted again into cloth.

Kosha AI’s optical device can instantly tell the composition of a yarn — whether it's a cotton or polyester or rayon — right to the exact percentage, making segregating an easy task.

Krishnappa, Co-founder of Kosha AI said the grant money will go a long way in scaling his deep tech product, developed at the labs of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

“We still have to do a lot of pilot studies, to help us identify gaps and make it market fit. The award came at the right time, for it will tide us over till the market and the technology mature. Climate KIC also promised to help us with identifying how the technology is impacting the industry,” said Krishnappa.

The other four winning ventures are: Angirus, which provides sustainable alternatives to bricks; Ecorenowa, which improves solar panel recycling with onsite delamination; E-waste Social, which offers a traceable digital platform for e-waste; and Reverse, end-to-end system for reuse of glass and rigid plastic packaging containers.

Only by working together and nurturing, it is possible to create systemic solutions that prevent waste at its source and heal the world, said Kovshøj “Circularity isn’t just about reducing waste -- it’s about redesigning the system itself,” he added.