Hyderabad-based, 3-year-old tech startup Recykal offers a digital platform for waste management and recycling to various stakeholders such as individual households, SMBs, enterprises, municipal corporations, governments, aggregators and recyclers. Recykal is working with large aggregators across 20 states in India and channelizing materials to recyclers. The company’s digital solutions are deployed across various businesses and it is currently operational in Hyderabad, Pune, Telangana, Andhra and Karnataka (starting in August).
While sharing insights of their journey, Abhishek Deshpande, founder of Recykal said, “We were sure that if we will know the industry we would be able to provide a better solution. From our ground level research, we understood that this industry lacks traceability, transparency and there is a lot of uncertainty in this market. The industry is largely unorganized, and that’s where we saw the opportunity.”
Recykal not only provides solutions for plastic waste but for all eWaste and paper waste as well. “Approximately 1500 metric tons of recyclable per month is flowing through our platform,” said Anirudha Jalan, co-founder of Recykal.
In June 2019, Recykal raised pre-series funding of US$ 2 million which will help the company expand its business across the country. Deshpande shared, “By December 2019, we are expecting to expand our business to six major cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.”
Digital innovation allows better visibility
Digital technology has better adoption nowadays and that is what made the founders grab this opportunity to make waste management and the recycle initiative successful.
Describing the company’s business model, Deshpande said, “We provide customized Cloud-based solutions and mobile applications to our stakeholders like waste generators, waste aggregators, processors and recyclers. Our aim is to connect every stakeholder on this digital platform and enable them to do more transactions with better visibility and transparency.”
The platform allows stakeholders to operate a business in a more logistic way besides helping them to save costs, reduce carbon footprint and make better profitability for the individual. It is designed to solve problems related to the lack of visibility of recyclables and its inconsistent supply. Recykal also runs takeback programs for FMCG clients like Chitale and other dairy brands from Maharashtra and ensures compliance with the EPR guidelines outlined by the government.
Applications offered by Recykal
Recykal understands that every stakeholder in this ecosystem has different requirements and based on their pain-points the company has built a functional platform of digital tools. The application ‘Uzed’ serves as a platform for recycling and incentivization for individual households. “This app has over 400,000 users,” Jalan shared. Other applications by Recykal include Digital pro, PRISM, Platform, Marketplace and Super.
Reloop
While explaining its different applications and programs, Deshpande urged the need for a change. He added, “We have understood during these three years that only brands, recyclers and municipal corporations can’t make sufficient impact. Every individual, every human being has to be a part of this activity.” Keeping this in mind, the company has launched Reloop – a plastic takeback digital platform. It is a cross value chain alliance of plastic manufacturers, FMCG companies, retailers and recyclers that aims to eliminate the impact of post-consumer plastic waste in the environment by technology-enabled takeback and recycling programs.
Recykal aims to build data and analytic capabilities in future that can help municipal corporations to make better decisions in planning and optimizing their daily operations. Further, to ensure better quality among its services, the company will be implementing a rating system on its digital platform.
Recykal has won several awards and recognitions including the Assocham award for ‘Best waste management digital technology provider’.
Interesting end-to-end solution. http://www.recykal.com
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we are interested to know your customer base in gujarat as we need to tie up with waste management activity as a EPR(Extended Producers Responsibility)
If you can share such agencies who are engaged in this activities for back collection,seggregation, reclycling and then forwarding to agency for road making and cement plants etc.