“I have always been passionate about becoming an entrepreneur. Both my parents are entrepreneurs and I wanted to follow their path too.
When I was in college, I wanted to do something useful which would contribute to the betterment of the environment. After my graduation, I went to New Zealand to pursue my Post Graduate Diploma in Environment Resource Management. That’s when an idea struck me where I decided to work on waste management. I observed the process of how they were able to manage the waste without affecting the environment by various upcycling and recycling methods of different kinds of waste. I found it innovative. I felt there’s an opportunity to kickstart my entrepreneurial journey.
Coming back to India in 2015, I was all set to start my own company which would provide environmental solutions. But the biggest questions were what to start, how to start and where to start. Initially I thought of venturing into common kinds of waste management solutions such as solid waste and plastic waste. During that time, one of my professor from Andhra University suggested that I focus on e-Waste management which is quite new in India. He told that e-Waste management is the future, as there’s a tremendous increase in the production and consumption patterns of electronic products and most importantly, there’s no replacement in utilisation of these products. That triggered me to start working on e-Waste management. At that time, even Central government has enforced the e-Waste management rule. I did a survey and found that there was nobody there to address this aspect in Andhra Pradesh. I also met environmentalists and people working on this at a Waste Management Summit in 2015 at Hyderabad, which was the biggest opportunity for me to put my ideas in one place.
That set the foundation stone to start Green Waves Environmental Solutions in 2015 in Vishakapatnam. It took about six months for us to plan the financial strategies and create linkages with factories. When we initially started, our initiatives aimed at safe disposal of electronic wastes, received a cold response from the public. It’s not that all the people have the same attitude. However, there are many who are yet to understand the harm they do upon the planet by selling their e-wastes to scrap dealers. Inorder to create awareness among the public, we gave goodies to people after receiving e-wastes from them. We also installed specific storage bins and storage racks for proper storage of e-waste. We conducted awareness campaigns with the help of volunteers having knowledge of environmental science inorder to sensitize people about the hazardous affects of improper disposal of the e-wastes.
The e-waste which we collect from various sources are segregated and sorted.
While specific materials are sent to registered e-Waste recyclers for treatment and recovery, fragments of plastic, glass are sent to secondary recycling industry. It’s been five years so far and we have managed to collect and recycle 500 tonnes of e-waste across 3 different cities in India. Expanding our environmental solutions, we have also ventured into multiple areas such as floral waste and plastic waste management. Not only that, we also make bio degradable pencils with paper waste which can be converted into vegetable plants as we place seeds inside the pencil.
Considering the situation of corona virus outbreak in the country, we are currently making reusable face masks from the left over pieces of cotton which are generated while making garments and distributing those masks to the local people. As there’s a shortage of surgical masks in the country, we all need to leave the surgical masks for medical fraternity and the patients. For the others, taking proper precautions and maintaining social distancing is the need of the hour. We have one planet and we have limited resources. So let us recycle, reuse and reduce the waste!”
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