Shah Rukh Khan: Say no to plastic. The one thing that all environmental warriors teach us. But we begin and end the day with products that have been made from this virtually indestructible material. The truth is that our consumption and disposal of plastic has reached such unsustainable proportions that we need to address this using every idea and resource at hand.
Please welcome someone who's helping solve India's waste management issues, Mani Vajipey, recycler and cofounder/CEO of Banyan Nation.
(Applause)
Mani Vajipey: If recycling were an Olympic sport, India would win the gold medal. India has one of the highest rates of plastic recycling and recovery in the entire world. Higher than the likes of Singapore, countries in North America and even countries in Europe. India recovers and recycles over 60 percent of its plastic waste, whereas a developed country, like United States, manages just about 10 percent. This high rate of collection is largely possible thanks to the millions of informal recyclers, the kabadiwalas, the bhandiwallas and the raddiwalas that we find at every street corner across every city in India. And yet, in spite of such a ubiquitous, extensive and intricate network of recyclers, India's national scenery is dominated by filth and squalor. And the general perception is that we don't recycle our plastics.
The other thing about plastics in India is that any product made from recycled plastic is considered to be substandard and we expect it to be cheaper as well. What we don't realize is there are several types of plastics in their virgin and pure form, if recycled scientifically, can be recycled several times over without any compromise in quality. If we can recover and reuse our discarded plastic, then we save a significant amount of virgin plastic that we would have otherwise produced and consumed. And this is very important, because virgin plastic is made from fossil fuels that are an exhaustible resource. The more virgin plastic we produce and consume, the more plastic waste we have to manage.
Mismanagement of plastic waste leads to the leakage of such materials into our water bodies. It's now common knowledge that by the year 2050 we'll have more plastics in our oceans than fish.
About seven years ago, my friend and cofounder Raj and I, we decided that we were going to focus on solving this massive problem. We went around the city of Hyderabad, talking to local recyclers. Very soon, we found out that there were many recyclers just in Hyderabad alone. We soon realized that the plastic recycling industry of today is not very different from the milk industry of the '60s and '70s. Milk in India is produced by marginal milk farmers, with two or three cows or buffalos, who produce five to ten liters of milk a day. Instead of blindly aping solutions from the West, India championed the milk cooperative model, where thousands of such small-scale recyclers were brought together into groups. With scale came innovations and investments. India was transformed from a milk-deficit nation to the world's leading exporter and producer of milk. It dawned upon us that India had in the past solved much larger problems, like milk deficiency. We only need to look back to our past to find inspiration in solving what is perhaps the most fundamental issue of our times, that is plastic pollution.
But before we could do this, or before brands could use recycled plastic, we had to solve two things. Quality and scale. For us, to make a shampoo bottle from discarded plastics, we had to collect tens of thousands of tons of discarded plastics. For that, we needed data. Raj and I built a simple data intelligence platform that allowed us to map all the recyclers, giving us a bird's eye view of every recycler in Hyderabad. The results were astounding. There were 2,000 kabadiwalas just in Hyderabad alone. That means, for every square kilometer, there were four kabadiwalas or informal recyclers. No developed country or city in the entire world has the luxury of such a brilliant collection system.
(Applause)
Once we had the data, the rest was fairly straightforward. We started trading with the informal recyclers, we started training them to segregate the materials based on our quality specifications. In the past five years, we've developed several clusters across South India, comprising of thousands of such informal recyclers, who interact with us both directly and digitally. In parallel, we began working on the problem of quality and purity of material. So in the past five years, we developed a proprietary cleaning technology that allows us to eliminate all contaminants.
Today, Banyan's recycled granules have undergone stringent quality testing and have been certified by top global FMCG and automotive companies. In the next few months, tens of thousands of discarded plastics collected through informal recycler networks will be converted into high-quality granules and sent away to brands and large companies to make bottles for engine-oil packaging, for shampoo bottles and for lotions. In the next three years, we expect that over 500 million such bottles will be made from our recycled plastics.
(Applause)
But this is just the beginning. In the next five years, we aspire to build an India where 100 percent of discarded plastics are recycled and repurposed scientifically -- where plastic waste no longer threatens our water bodies, and the very survival of our terrestrial and marine life.
So the next time you go to a store and pick up a shampoo bottle, see if that bottle uses safe and sustainable recycled plastic. That's not only just going to help the Earth but also reward the street corner recycler for his all-important work. Now that will compel brands to use more and more recycled plastic for their mainstream products and applications.
Our tradition and our culture has a lot of ancient wisdom. Let's not destroy the only planet we have. The only home we have.
Thank you.
(Applause)
SRK: Thank you, Mani. When I was young, I used to -- (sings in Hindi). How little do we know sometimes that we are, as a nation, the biggest recycler of plastics and waste, if not just plastic, and we didn't know this about our own country.
MV: May I say something really cool? Cities like New York and Paris today are looking to put out reverse vending machines so that people can go and put trash in that and then they can get some cash. For the past several decades, the entire country and the kabadiwalas, and the bhandiwallas, we have been doing that. I'm very positive that in three to five years, you'll wake up, you know that the plastic is being recycled, you're going to pick up a packaging, you know that the package actually has a mark that uses recycled plastics, so I'm super optimistic about this. Even as an entrepreneur.
(Applause)
SRK: When I see a youngster do what he has done and achieved, I want that part to also be a source of encouragement for people to take over. So tell me, are you making a lot of money?
MV: What's so brilliant about plastic recycling now is it's an idea whose time has come. And we're very fortunate to have signed a really big, multimillion-dollar contract with some of the top FMCG companies. So we are at the inflection point in India. And --
SRK: Tell us the money, money, money, Mani.
MV: (Laughs)
SRK: Give the figure, it will encourage people, it's not for greed, it's not for any of the reasons ... Say to them. They are making good money, yeah.
(Applause)
MV: For us, to build these systems in place, we need investors who will back us to develop --
(Laughter)
(Applause)
SRK: You have to be like Mani that I'm asking, "How much you're making?" he's already making it off me. But I may look stupid, but I'm not. I totally and completely believe in the concept of recycling plastic, and I'm going to help Mani with my first investment that all the plastic bottles that we have at shootings, in every shooting of mine, I'm going to send it to his company to recycle, starting from these four.
Thank you very much, Mani.
(Applause)
MV: Thank you so much.
SRK: Big round of applause for Mani.
(Applause)
