Plastic Fantastic

Four friends in Amravati are transforming trash into a trend, crafting sustainable furniture from 100% recycled plastic waste

- Bunty Thoidingjam

A bustling start-up culture and entrepreneurial buzz are not what Amravati is typically known for. Instead, agricultural production, cotton mills and pilgrimage sites define the second-largest city in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Madhur Rathi, chief executive of the sustainable furniture company Econiture, knows this well. In 2017, when he launched a start-up with three friends, there was much uncertainty over how a new company would fare in Amravati. That sentiment has since undergone a sea change—eight years on, the company's founders are confident they took the right decision.

But the journey has not always been straightforward. Rathi moved to Nagpur to study industrial engineering, and in 2009, moved to Bengaluru, where he worked as an assistant manager at Mahindra & Mahindra before enrolling for an MBA degree in 2012 in the southern city.

A waste-management conference that he attended during this time proved to be the catalyst that changed his career path. Inspired, Rathi moved to Ahmedabad in 2014 to work at a recycling firm, Nepra Resource Management.

Waste to Wealth

But Amravati was calling. In 2017, Rathi returned home to be closer to his family. He had valuable experience in waste management and he had the idea for a new venture. And thus Recycle Bell was born—co-founded by Rathi and his friends Roshan Pidiyar, Bhushan Boob and Ashish Modak—to collect and segregate dry waste like plastic, paper and metal from waste aggregators and sell it to recyclers.