Recycling for a better future

Quitting their cushy jobs in a multinational corporate, Mani Vajipey and Raj Madangopal decided to take up the cause of waste management and recycling plastic and thus was seeded the roots to their startup, Banyan Tree. In the news recently for bagging $800,000 in funding to scale up their business, the duo are all calm and poise.

But the journey to get to this stage was never easy, says Mani, the CEO of the organisation. He, along with his friend  and former classmate Raj Madangopal,  COO, started this company with an intention to take on worldly issues. They, however, decided to take one problem at a time and finalised on waste management and recycling plastic.

While Mani was dabbling with the idea since 2012, Raj came on board in 2013. “I was in the US working on setting up mobile start-ups, mobile portals. But, once I heard Mani’s business idea, I took a break and spent a considerable time understanding the infrastructural issues and how certain systems from the US could be adapted to solve problems here,” says Raj.   

They identified that millions of people were employed in the waste management industry. People like rag pickers or the kabadiwalas were actually making a living out of it. While there were several recyclers in the city, shockingly none of them were registered, says Mani adding, “The big problem was that they were all non-pollution board compliant and produced bad quality goods.” Mani and Raj then decided to integrate the front end, improve supply and create a formal system giving minimum wages to its employees — mostly women —and recycle it the right way.

However, competing in an industry where everything was informal, the profit margins were low, says Mani. And eventually they ran out of funds.  

While Mani travelled to Singapore and US looking for more investors, the bank balance read Rs 5,000, recalls Raj. “No one knew about it, including our investors and employees,” he says. But staying together as a team helped them scale through the tough tidings, says Mani.

Today, with funds coming in, they plan to showcase their first product by the end of the year. They are also currently in talks with a few FMCG companies and plan to bring in recycled plastic into the market in a big way.