The Trash that Built a Bench

A wood alternative made from plastic may sound utopian, but it is exactly what Bengaluru-based unWOOD does

- By BINDU GOPAL RAO

What do you usually do with an empty chips packet? Toss it into the bin, right? And then it ends up in a landfill, quietly sitting there for the next few hundred years. But what if that crinkly wrapper could come back as a sleek park bench or a piece of stylish outdoor furniture? Sounds a bit out there? Well, not to Vishal Mehta and Dr Babu Padmanabhan.

Mehta, who spent over 17 years managing infrastructure projects often related to renewable energy, had a growing frustration. "That work deepened my commitment to sustainability, but it also exposed a persistent problem," he says. "Even sustainable power projects generate significant waste. There simply wasn't a viable, scalable solution to dispose of it responsibly."