These Startups Rethink 'Circularity' To Stop Waste From Ending Up In Landfills

Little over a year ago, when Steer World unveiled unWOOD as a sustainable alternative to wood at KPLEX 2024, a polymer exhibition held in Bengaluru, it was not exactly perfect.

- Press Trust Of India

This man-made "wood", made by compacting granules that were obtained by shredding plastic waste - those pesky hard-to-recycle plastic wrappers that litter every corner of India— was coarse to touch, not particularly appealing to the eye.

In less than a year, unWOOD has ticked off the aesthetics box too, by fine tuning their proprietary Macro Molecular Fiber Matrix process that mimics the strength, look, and feel of hardwood.

You need to really get close now to the improved version of unWOOD to tell it apart from wood.

Babu Padmanaban, Founder of Steer World, said every one kg of unWOOD prevents 1.5 kg of CO2 emissions polluting our air and recycles 500gm of plastic waste.

"Of course, there is that fully grown tree that need not sacrifice itself to become your chair or bed," Vishal Mehta, Co-founder and CEO of unWOOD told PTI.

The sustainable brand hit another milestone 10 days ago when it became one of the eight transformative startups that won the newly launched Circular Economy Catalytic Grant of Climate KIC, a European climate innovation agency that is looking at the circular economy in India through the lens of entrepreneurship.