How this climate-tech startup is closing the loop on plastic waste

Victoria Joslin D’Souza grew up in Naganahalli, a village nestled along the banks of the Kabini river in Karnataka’s Mysuru district. In her early years, the village had no electricity, and she studied under the light of a Petromax lamp up to Class 12.

The daughter of a farmer and a school teacher, D’Souza witnessed her father’s fight to restore power to their British-era colony, where, she says, “the power supply arrears were so high that they had disconnected the power” after Independence.

After completing her diploma in electrical engineering, D’Souza moved to Bengaluru during the 2000-2001 call centre boom. She worked in companies such as iSaver, Convergys, and Accenture. She then transitioned to the events space in 2004 and later founded her own company, Pro Tantra.

But life felt hollow. One day, while strolling through Freedom Park in Bengaluru, she witnessed the Indian Against Corruption movement in full swing. There was an ocean of people but no proper infrastructure or organisation to it.

“I told the organisers I was an event manager and asked if I could help. I started volunteering for the movement, and this continued with the AAP movement until the elections,” she says.

During this period, D’Souza was influenced by activists like Dr Meenakshi Bharath and others, kindling an interest in waste management. She began volunteering with NGOs focused on environmental and waste management issues.

In 2006–07, she met her future co-founders, Vinay Raghavan and Rajesh Babu, who were working on starting an NGO called Swachha. The hands-on experience that D’Souza gathered while working for the NGOs led to ‘Swachha – Project Bengaluru’ in 2008, and Swachha Eco Solutions Pvt Ltd in 2012.

Closing the plastic loop

“We started by going door-to-door, telling people about segregation, because at that time everybody was putting everything together. We were part of SWMRT (Solid Waste Management Round Table) with people like Nalini Shekhar (Hasiru Dala) and Wilma Rodrigues (Sahaas Zero Waste),” D’Souza says.

They realised that working individually as citizens wouldn’t be possible, so they approached the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to work on solutions.

Their efforts, alongside SWMRT, led to dry waste collection centres in every ward.

“Bengaluru is the only city that has dry waste collection centres in each ward,” notes D’Souza.

They understood that contractor-managed centres would likely revert to mixing waste, and so they proposed something innovative: let NGOs manage the centres and make waste pickers the owners.

Swachha began managing 32 dry waste collection centres, but D’Souza’s efforts did not just stop there.

Walking through Yelahanka, a neighbourhood in Bengaluru, one day, she spotted a large, abandoned BBMP building filled with unused recycling machinery. The facility had been locked for years, its equipment stolen, leaving only empty shells.

"I convinced the commissioner to convert it into a recycling unit in a PPP (private-public partnership) model. I told him, ‘Give me the land, and Karnataka will be the first to do recycling in association with the government’,” she recollects.

The commissioner suggested annual renewable permits to circumvent political challenges.

With seed funding from friends and family and Rs 20 lakh from Infosys veterans Mohandas Pai and V Balakrishnan through B.PAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee), D’Souza began her mission to close the plastic loop.

But the concept of recycling was new. There were no buyers, and so the founders had to clump them into gattas (lumps of plastic) and send them to Pune to make drip irrigation pipes.

Slowly, the movement gathered steam, with a material recovery facility. Then it moved into LDPE (low-density polyethylene) granulation, PP (polypropylene) granulation and HDPE (high-density polyethylene) granulation. These are for segregation depending on density and type.

While the NGO arm of Swachha handles dry waste collection centres, the private limited company takes care of recycling the collected plastic waste.

Today, Swachha operates two recycling facilities—one in Bengaluru and another in Hosur, Tamil Nadu—processing post-consumer and post-production plastic waste.

Swachha’s operation spans the entire value chain: door-to-door collection from 28 areas, secondary segregation at material recovery facilities, and granulation of HDPE (shampoo bottles, oil cans), PP (food containers), and LDPE (packaging films) plastics.

For LDPE, its main source is post-production waste from companies such as Wipro, Caterpillar, and Ashok Leyland.

Till date, Swachha has benefitted/impacted the lives of over half a million people, while diverting 1,10,000+ tonnes of waste from the landfills and recycling 60,000+ tonnes of plastic waste.

The journey towards impact has not been without a fair share of struggles. From 10 kilos of PP plastic, only 7.5 kilos emerge as usable granules after washing and processing.

“There are losses, but this plastic would otherwise reach our oceans or landfills,” D’Souza explains.

Sixty percent of their direct employees are women—a deliberate choice to ensure that money reaches the hands of the waste-picker families’ primary caregivers. Swachha has enabled over 2,800 informal waste pickers to transition into the formal economy, improving their livelihoods

It sells granules to packaging companies like Manjushree Technopak Limited. and Maruti Poly Products. PP becomes buckets and paint buckets.

Innovation from waste

Swachha has invented the ‘Retile’ pavement tiles, made from 100% homogeneous plastic without sand or cement additives.

“If a plastic chair can hold 150 kilos, why can’t a pavement tile?” asks D’Souza.

Getting the tiles to the market has been challenging because Swachha cannot compete with cement tiles on cost; Retile’s cost will always be higher. Swachha is hoping to break into a niche market.

Its Repolymix technology addresses a larger challenge: road construction. Working with Rasta, an independent, expert institute on road building process and a non-profit organisation, managed by an independent trust of Volvo India Pvt Ltd., Swachha has developed a pre-processed plastic blend that road contractors can simply mix with hot bitumen.

True to its open-source philosophy, Swachha has never patented its technology.

D’Souza points out that recycling is not even 10% organised in India. The extended producer responsibility (EPR) system, designed to make manufacturers accountable for their waste, is often exploited.

“EPR filing requires e-invoicing, but GST rules limit e-invoicing to companies with Rs 5+ crore turnover. When I want to upload my recycling credits, the system doesn’t accept them. I can’t even sell the credits,” she elaborates.

Despite its impact and the market demand, Swachha has not attracted the investments it needs to scale up.

“Investors say our ticket size is too small. When we want to scale up, they say our turnover isn’t enough. We’re stuck in this loop.” Swachha needs Rs 10 crore to Rs 15 crore to reach its authorised capacity of 4,800 tonnes per annum.

“Recycling is more expensive than virgin material because of collection, transportation, segregation, and losses. It’s not profitable until scaled, and scaling requires patient capital,” says D’Souza.

For the past four years, the company has managed waste for Bengaluru’s Aero Show, one of the largest aerospace exhibitions in India.

“We hire more than 300 people a day to manage the waste. For the past three years, it’s been a zero landfill event—not even one kilogramme of waste goes to landfills.”

With brands increasingly accepting recycled granules, D’Souza is reaching out to investors for funding.

“We are trying to make them understand that collection is not the only thing, recycling infrastructure is necessary. I want to build a strong infrastructure so that anyone who wants to enter this business can do so with a clear path,” signs off D’Souza.