Neo San wants to decentralise India’s waste management by making incinerators more efficient

Waste incinerators have a reputation problem. Research has shown that older incinerator technology and infrequent maintenance schedules are linked to health issues, including certain cancers. 

The problem is even worse in India where non-biodegradable waste, which ends up in landfills, is burned in the open. 

Enter Neo San, a Bengaluru-based startup that aims to decentralise India's waste management system by helping its customers treat waste at its source. Neo San's incinerators burn waste with 90% less emissions than traditional incinerators. 

“Incineration has a bad name. People confuse it with burning. Fires are not the same. You have fires burning waste in open grounds at 400-500 degrees Celsius, and then you have had the traditional incinerators that were burning waste at 800 degrees Celsius and producing harmful fumes,” says Dhwaj Bagrecha, Co-founder and CEO of Neo San. 

Disposal without the long drive

Before launching Neo San, Bagrecha researched how non-recyclable waste is handled in India. According to him, waste is first segregated, and certain types of reject waste or hazardous waste are washed with chemicals and the remaining chemical-filled sludge is burned—a process that’s harmful to the environment.

Neo San's incinerators address this issue by burning as much waste as possible at the source. 

The process also helps reduce emissions from transport from the waste management chain because waste is eliminated at the source.

"Governments save money, corporations save money, and land is saved over time," the co-founder adds.

What does Neo San offer?

The company currently sells two models of its incinerators, Neo-X and Neo-XT, that can process waste ranging from multi-layered packages to bio-medical waste between 25 kilograms per day to 60 kgs per day. The machines’ temperature reaches 1200 degrees Celsius in two minutes with electricity that costs less than Rs 1/kg of waste.

Another critical feature of Neo San's incinerators is data collection. The startup's incinerators collect data on the waste it burns, including how much emissions it managed to cut down and the kind of waste it burned in the cycle. 

“The more we understand the patterns of waste management, the more we can understand the consumption patterns. The more data we have around gas emissions, energy consumed, and how much waste is produced, the better we can build our systems,” says Bagrecha.

This helps the startup understand and perfect the product. Neo San also plans to share the data with its clients going forward, which will help companies understand and account for their carbon footprint. 

“We are not here to replace the existing system completely. The sector needs large players and the government's system in place,” Bagrecha says. “But the system could use players like us to help contain a large amount of rejected waste.”

The origin

Bagrecha and Co-founder Alistair D’rozario met in 2018 while the former was working for a steel straws manufacturing company. At the time, D’rozario was developing a machine to treat menstrual waste. 

As time passed, their paths crossed frequently, and Bagrecha decided to join the team D’rozario had put in place to develop an incinerator meant to target a specific kind of waste. 

They zeroed in on the name Neo San, which brings together two things the duo is passionate about—the Matrix series, where the protagonist, Neo, breaks away from the existing system, and sanitation. 

After establishing Neo San in 2022 as a private limited company, D’rozario focused on technology, while Bagrecha focused on ground research and understanding the marketing side.

"Decentralised waste management is a very new concept, so there was nothing out there for us to copy," he says.

The company spent five years testing the product, seed funding its development and research from their own pockets. 

As research deepened, which Bagrecha recalls included driving around with the machine they developed to customers and requesting feedback on their products, he realised that their product should help eliminate a broader range of waste products. Soon, they began experimenting with packaging materials. A few years later, Neo-X was born. 

“We knew we had a good product, and we knew we would have no trouble selling it,” says Bagrecha. 

However, finding the right investors took a lot of work. The product is capital-heavy and requires zero compromise when it comes to the raw materials as it needs to maintain quality and safety. 

Bagrecha says there were days when they could not get a single meeting because of the negative image attached to the word 'incineration,' and then there were days when he would leave the product with a potential client for six months, paying for the service out of his pocket to change people's mindsets around what their incinerators could do. 

Slowly, non-profit organisations started taking notice of Neo San's incinerators, and while closely collaborating with these organisations, such as Ecogram, companies began taking notice. The product took almost two years to establish itself in the market. 

In June, Neo San raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round from investors Ashish Kacholia, Indian pro-golfers Anirban Lahiri and S. Chikkarangappa, Aaradhana Jhunjhunwala, Aman Poddar, and Adithya Mathews among others.

The company has sold 150 units of its incinerators, Bagrecha says. Its clients include Bengaluru International Airport and Government of Karnataka to multinational companies like TATA Steel and Microsoft. 

Neo San is targeting a market that has room for growth. India’s market for solid waste management is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.5% between 2021-2026, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Administration. 

The country’s Central Pollution Control Board has also projected that the annual waste generation in India will rise to 165 million metric tons by 2030, with an increase in hazardous waste, plastic, e-waste and bio-medical waste. 

Journey ahead 

Neo San is all set to roll out its next model of incinerators called Atom that can burn up to 1 tonne of waste across a broader range of industries including chemical waste, automobile industry waste and others. 

Bagrecha says the product is almost ready, and the company is making final tweaks to it, targeting its launch in August. 

Neo San also plans to roll out more models of their smaller incinerator, Neo-X, with varying higher capacities to suit a range of clients. The new funds will be targeted at making sure its products are "market-ready." 

The company, which currently has clients across major cities in India, is also looking forward to breaking into the Middle East, Africa, and Japan this financial year. 

(The copy was updated to correct factual errors)