In a country where waste is everywhere but systems are invisible, Recykal began with a simple but powerful insight: India does not lack people working on waste—it lacks coordination.
Recykal was founded in 2016 by Abhay Deshpande along with co-founders including Abhishek Deshpande and Anirudha Jalan. The founding team did not begin with a polished business plan. Instead, they spent nearly two years studying India’s waste ecosystem on the ground—landfills, scrap yards, and informal networks of waste pickers. They often refer to this period as their “MBA in waste management.”
What they discovered was not just inefficiency but fragmentation. Waste in India moves through a complex chain: households, kabadiwalas, aggregators, recyclers, and finally manufacturers. Each operates in isolation. There is little data, almost no traceability, and minimal accountability. Valuable recyclable material often ends up in landfills simply because the system does not “talk” to itself.
Recykal’s founding idea emerged from this gap: if you cannot fix every physical part of the system, connect them digitally.
What Recykal actually built
At its core, Recykal is a digital marketplace for waste. But that description is too simple to capture its scope.
The platform connects waste generators (brands, businesses), collectors (aggregators, informal workers), and recyclers into a single network. It enables transactions, tracks movement of waste, and creates a digital record of what happens to it.
Over time, this evolved into three major layers. First is the marketplace, where waste is bought and sold with better price discovery and transparency. Second is compliance infrastructure—particularly around Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), where brands are legally required to ensure their waste is recycled. Third is behavioral systems like deposit-refund models that incentivize consumers to return packaging.
This is important to understand: Recykal does not move waste physically. It moves information. And in a system where information is missing, that becomes the most valuable layer.
Growth, scale, and funding
Recykal’s journey from a small startup to a significant climate-tech player has been steady. It has raised roughly $37–45 million over multiple funding rounds, with investors including Circulate Capital and Morgan Stanley-backed funds.
But more telling than funding is operational scale. The company has built a network of hundreds of brands, recyclers, and thousands of businesses across India. By 2023–24, it had channelled close to or over a million metric tonnes of waste back into the recycling ecosystem.
To put that simply: millions of tonnes of waste that could have ended up in landfills were instead redirected into reuse.
What makes the solution unique
Many companies in waste management focus on collection, processing, or recycling technologies. Recykal’s uniqueness lies in treating waste as a data problem rather than just a logistics problem.
First, it creates traceability. A brand can now track whether its plastic packaging was actually recycled or just “claimed” to be recycled. This matters because compliance in India has often been paperwork-heavy and trust-light.
Second, it formalises an informal sector. India’s waste system relies heavily on informal workers—rag pickers and small aggregators. By bringing them onto a digital platform, Recykal gives them visibility, better pricing, and access to larger markets.
Third, it enables policy to work in practice. Regulations like EPR exist on paper, but enforcement is difficult without data. Recykal becomes the infrastructure that allows governments and companies to actually implement these rules.
Finally, it nudges behaviour. Through deposit-refund systems—where consumers get money back for returning bottles or packaging—it turns recycling from a moral act into an economic one.
Pilots, performance, and real-world impact
One of Recykal’s notable implementations has been India’s first digital deposit refund system in Uttarakhand, particularly around pilgrimage routes like Kedarnath. This system rewarded people for returning plastic waste and significantly reduced litter in ecologically sensitive areas.
The company has also worked with hundreds of brands to manage their EPR obligations and has partnered with urban local bodies to improve municipal waste tracking.
Market feedback has generally highlighted two things. Large enterprises value the compliance and traceability layer, especially as environmental regulations tighten. Meanwhile, recyclers and aggregators benefit from better price discovery and more consistent supply.
There has also been skepticism in the early days—especially from traditional players who saw waste as a purely physical business. As one anecdote captures, recyclers initially questioned why anyone would “bring the internet into garbage.”
Over time, that skepticism has turned into adoption.
Recykal in the “tech for good” landscape
Recykal sits at the intersection of climate tech, civic tech, and marketplace platforms. Its impact is not just environmental but systemic.
From a “tech for good” perspective, it addresses three core problems. It reduces environmental harm by diverting waste from landfills. It improves livelihoods by integrating informal workers into formal value chains. And it strengthens governance by making compliance measurable and transparent.
Unlike many sustainability solutions that rely on consumer goodwill, Recykal aligns incentives. Brands comply because they must. Recyclers participate because it improves business. Consumers engage because there is a financial return.
This alignment is what makes the model durable.
In India, the broader space includes companies like Banyan Nation, Nepra, and Gravita, which focus more on recycling processes and material recovery. Recykal complements rather than directly competes with many of them by acting as the digital layer above these operations.
Globally, the closest parallels are platforms that enable circular economy tracking and compliance. Companies in Europe and the US are building digital waste tracking systems, carbon accounting tools, and reverse logistics platforms. However, most operate in more formalised ecosystems.
What makes Recykal distinctive is that it operates in one of the most complex and informal waste systems in the world—and still manages to digitise it.
The global context: why this model matters
The world is moving toward a circular economy, where materials are reused rather than discarded. But this transition requires visibility. You cannot recycle efficiently if you do not know where materials are, who has them, and where they should go.
In developed markets, this visibility is often built into supply chains. In emerging markets, it is not. That is the gap Recykal fills.
Globally, there is increasing regulatory pressure on companies to account for their environmental impact. This creates demand for platforms that can track waste, prove recycling, and enable compliance.
In that sense, Recykal is not just solving an Indian problem. It is building a model that could be relevant across emerging economies where waste systems are fragmented and largely informal.
- Our correspondent
