Saurabh Kumar Singh
Clay Hobson
Mayra Elizabeth Molina Cedillo
P V V RAVINDRA
EGADE Business School Tecnologico de Monterrey
Francisco Layrisse
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Trashin uses an app-based marketplace to pair persons and companies with waste products to waste handlers. By improving the rates of recycling, decreasing dumping and littering, and generating employment opportunities for members of society who are less respected, Trashin is improving lives and living conditions in eight cities in India.
Trashin is a multi-sided platform (MSP) which connects waste creators (corporations and households) with waste processors (waste companies companies, as well as independent waste haulers/recyclers). It began almost eight years ago, and now has partners in every province in India and is actively handling waste in eight major cities. Trashin creates economic opportunity, improves urban living conditions, and reduces environmental impact from improper waste handling and dumping.
According to the Solid Waste Management Rules (2016), India has framed laws which have introduced the concept of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for plastic packaging waste and e-waste.
“Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is the commitment made by a producer or brand-owner to facilitate a reverse collection mechanism and recycling of end of life, post-consumer waste. The objective is to circle it back into the system to recover resources embedded in the waste.”
The major impact of Trashin is its platform and app outside of waste collection, corporate users have access to dashboards to track their categorized waste generation and waste expenditures.
Trashin benefits from the app explosion in India in around 2020, especially among waste collectors. It supplies them a modern aggregator marketplace that connects partners and recyclers to the consumers. This has increased the adoption rate for Waste recycling, and improved the income levels for the partners.
Trashin felt that having a fixed relationship to government reduces flexibility, and subjects a startup to political change; therefore, they chose to work with industry partners and occupy a B2B niche, to remain agile. At the time of publication, no competitor has an app-based EPR solution
Trashin benefits from their innovative platform by receiving an approximately 15% share of the fees billed by each waste collector through the app. By providing a SaaS platform for this, this income is passive and scalable.
The waste collection companies benefit from having improved oversight and coordination between their employees, an increase in available tasks, and an efficiency improvement due to the task providers having a better understanding of the waste process.
Business users of the platform benefit from having a dashboard that tracks their waste generation and recycling utilization. This helps them reconcile the specific costs of the waste they generate, which has upstream incentives in waste reduction. They also gain the benefit of on-demand waste pickup without being committed to a contract with a single firm, a large increase in flexibility.
On the demand side (waste producers), Trashin builds education and awareness. In India, only 20% of waste is segregated and only 15% is processed; the vast majority is landfilled. As a nation, 70mm tons are produced annually; this is projected to grow to 200mm tons by 2041, so intervention is required to avoid massive waste.
Trashin serves a highly fragmented customer base (communities, individuals, institutions) who each have diverse needs. In India the trend has also been to highly fragmented waste processors (scale, type of product, jurisdiction, contract).
Trashin's app has a matching algorithm; customers incentivized to right-size waste solution to reduce their cost. This reduces secondary environmental impacts, reduces cycle times for the waste processor and Trashin, and generates more business for independent owner-operators.
During COVID-19, Trashin worked with its partners and users to improve distribution and usage of PPE during pandemic, and used its platform to educate all classes of users on safe handling procedures during COVID. This improved community health. They also waived their fees & donated that value to COVID funds during the pandemic
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Trashin is an internet platform, connecting waste generators to recyclers. India generates 62 million tones of solid waste annually out of which 80% is landfilled. It addresses this waste of precious resources and uses efficient collection, processing and recycling methods to 'transform waste to resource'. It currently handles 180 tons per month at its Bangalore facility. Our clients include ITC Ltd, Decathlon, IKEA, Oriflame, GeoCycle, Birla Shakthi Cements amongst others. Trashin is a part of the 7th cohort at Launchpad, NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore.