Battleground Plastics

Harsh Mariwala’s Marico Innovation Foundation is working with start-ups to create a circular economy that will positively disrupt the plastic ecosystem by taking care of the environment and creating a profitable business opportunity

- KRISHNA GOPALAN

EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, it’s there. Hanging from shopfronts, littering the sidewalks, strategically hidden around our houses, filling our dump yards, etc. Plastics have permeated our lives like hardly anything else in modern society.

While plastics are used by all of us, most do not understand how seriously the material disrupts our fragile environment. And while awareness has definitely increased over the years, very little has been achieved in terms of eliminating or reducing its usage. Further, looking at how extensively plastics are used, a solution to the problems of overuse, disposal and recycling has largely eluded us.

It is in search of answers to these questions like these that Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of fast-moving consumer goods company Marico, established a notfor-profit entity called Marico Innovation Foundation (MIF) in 2003 to explore the avenues where the group could support viable solutions.

“I realised the need to solve this challenge,” says Mariwala. “The team [at MIF] did a deep dive in areas such as land and water pollution. It was apparent that plastic was ripe for an intervention, since there were major innovations emerging in the space, with a clear need for an ecosystem to be built around it.”

Mariwala was of the view that most of the research that had been done focussed only on the problems around plastics, and not enough on viable solutions. “The ecosystem was looking for solutions across the value chain and that included recycling, sorting and collection. There was also a gap in knowledge on what one should focus on,” Mariwala explains. That led MIF to prepare a report, as “the first step to create a knowledge book on plastics that offers innovative solutions”.