Waste is money, say founders of Scrapdeal

Venture provides doorstep scrap collection service across the city

- Namita Shibad

Perhaps itis the learning at engineering schools that sometimes sows small seeds of entrepreneurial thinking, Jayesh Pakhale was at the end of his mechanical engineering course at Sinhagad College and had to prepare to leave his hostel room.

“When I was in the final year of my graduation, I found myself with a surplus of old college journals, books, and newspapers that I needed to dispose of. I set out to find a local “kabadiwala” in the market who could come to my place and collect all the scrap material ata fair price. Unfortunately, Iwas unable to find one. They all required me to transport the heavy 100kg+ material to their shop, which simply wasn't feasible.”

That made him think. How did senior citizens, and working professionals manage to disburse their waste? Surely this simple job must be quite a task for them. He set about to do some research on the subject. Says Jayesh, “As luck would have it, I had an uncle who already had a shop in Pune related to this line of work. He was generous enough to share valuable information and contact numbers of various vendors. This became the basic foundation for my new business venture “Scrapdeal” which was registered in 2021.”

Initial steps

Fired by his experience, Jayesh worked out a method that he thought would work. “I felt that people should be able to simply request for scrap collection and the material be it books, plastic, metal, e-waste, even clothes, anything at all should be collected at their doorstep. There should be a proper weighing scale and payment should be made immediately. The rates should be made known to all beforehand.”