Gain Waste Solutions 2.98

STEP, IIT Kharagpur
Kharagpur, 721302
India

About Gain Waste Solutions

Gain Waste Solutions Gain Waste Solutions is one of the popular place listed under Company in Kharagpur , Recycling & Waste Management in Kharagpur ,

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GAIN WASTE SOLUTIONS:

To tell you about our startup and the rollercoaster journey we have had so far, we need to tell you from the start of the cause and the initiative behind it.
It is very important that we introduce our team first. We are all students and Alumni of IIT Kharagpur. One of us, Anshu Bansal has graduated with his M.Tech Degree, Abhimanyu kar- a Mechanical PhD Student; we have Ananya, a Law Student passing out in 2014 and Biswadip Mandal a student of B. tech Electrical engineering. U.G. students namely Ankit Shekhar, Gopinath Soren and Ashish Thakur are looking after the R&D, Graphic Design and Marketing sides respectively.

We participated in a competition organized by IIHS, an academic institute dedicated to human population and related studies. They wanted us to pick up an urban problem and find its solution. The winning entries were to be given a grant of (only) 3 lakhs with which the problem was to be solved. So we came up with a sustainable revenue generating model putting together a lot of sleepless night to gather and build a research base and picked up solid waste management which we thought will run on its own revenue with low capital investment. We won the competition in December 2012. After that it was a little rough ride with all the legal and bureaucratic problems piling up to a bunch of newly enthusiastic engineers. However, we crossed all those hurdles and to be true, it was genuinely a great learning experience to face all that in college life. Though the model was originally planned for a township and was thought to attract big developers from the real estate arena, our connection with the KGP administration and proximity led us to implement the model in the Campus itself.

Gain Waste Solutions was incorporated on 5th November 2013. It has been a short, but a relatively steep journey for a core industry startup.
As per our model, the beneficiary township has to provide us land to set up a Recycling plant, which we got on lease from STEP, a society that is largely owned by IIT and basically setup to incubate student and professors' ventures. We built a vermi-composting unit and submitted a proposal for setting up a biogas unit, a plastic to diesel pyrolysis plant and a paper recycling unit. The proposal was considered under the “Green initiative” project, accepted, and a token grant of 50k was given, after which a report has to be submitted for further grants. As our proposal has been accepted, we hope IIT will fund the rest of the plants, and this is not bad for our business as in the initial stages we have planned to operate under a Build-Operate-Transfer [BOT] model and also focus on technology development and consultancy arena.
After completing a vermin-composting unit, we offered IIT waste collection services and were given a tender to collect waste from 7 halls of residence, the bigger ones, serving around 6,500 of the 10,000 student population.
Currently we collect the garbage from the dustbins of the halls (from 1st April) as per our well planned and at source waste segregation techniques keeping in mind to collect dry and wet waste separately. Though our ultimate model is to achieve maximum possible in-source segregation but for that we are moving step by step including spreading awareness within the population about the important of waste management.
Our current vermi-composting unit has 30 beds and can produce around 10 tonnes a month. However, there are plans to double it within the next two months, the time that takes a single batch to produce.
Given everything runs smoothly, this summer, we will prepare final drawings of our:
1. Waste Sorting Centre
2. Biogas plant.
3. Pyrolysis plant
4. Paper recycling plant

In all of them we have students working day and night to improve the technology as well as make it greener as per the need of the present situation of our Mother Earth. So far great results are coming out in waste management, vermin-composting and biogas plant. Our research is still on in the field of Plastic waste pyrolysis to produce diesel (along with small quantities for gasoline, coal tar and kerosene). This has been tried in many parts of the world. There’s a very successful company called Cynar PLC in Ireland. (www.cynarplc.com) However, it has been tried and mostly failed in India. We have plans to set up a small scale plant only for IIT. So we are trying to collaborate with many companies in and outside India to gain in terms of technology as well as projects.
We also have plans to set up a small paper mill. Currently we sell most of the paper waste, but a lot is left.
We are also providing design of recycling systems, consultancy as well as technology for other organizations, especially academic institutions, townships, municipalities, and real estate initiatives.

Commercial viability is not a problem here. We get paid for designing and implementing a cheap and effective waste collection and sorting service, we also get paid for selling sorted waste, or selling recycled products. As for vermin-compost, our cost of production has been kept low through intelligent design. As IIT students, we are abreast of the latest research in different fields of recycling. I am a PhD student and KGP connections with the faculty and research scholars around the world keep the R&D and design costs low. Every professor is eager to help us with their technology, the availability of research; study materials prove a huge boon. So, maintaining quality of our product is also not a problem.

Our model requires 3 things to occur at one place:

• A waste collection tender from the sanitation department, which pays us to collect waste (otherwise, at this scale it is not viable to collect waste at our own cost, but after some expansion, we can possibly charge much lower to almost zero for waste collection services, and that remains the goal of this social venture).

• The beneficiary authority interested to provide land (at low cost and low profit share).

• The beneficiary interested to fund the majority cost of the recycling plant or at least arranging the funding process to implement our project for them.

Getting these three conditions satisfied requires a bit of effort in the lengthy Bureaucratic system.
The idea was conceived considering that for India to be developed there needs to be good public service and technological advancement which needs to be perceived in the field of green technology. A large amount of our GDP is spent on things like building roads or lighting our streets. You can easily leave a comfortable life if you have a big house, with all facilities in a developing country. But the difference lies in the lives of the poor (the base pyramid), who largely depends on public services, those who visit government hospitals, study in public schools and has to use public toilets. There lies a difference between a developed and a developing country. Our team members recently visited South Korea and Malaysia for a conference. Those we developing countries which recently graduated to developed countries. The most difference I noticed as a common tourist is difference in buses, roads and public toilets, while the inside of buildings never looked much different.

It can make a lot of difference, at least in the lives of the base pyramid people, if we can give a boost to the improvement in public services. In such a large country, it is deplorable if the solely (our poor and less efficient) government has to deal with it. The idea was to come up with such services privately to create a complementary and more efficient way. Waste management looked like a promising starting step.

As for most of our team members, as for taking up social entrepreneurship as a career, we would like to add that in technology related fields, after you graduate you land up a glamorous job in the industry. For a student of technology, the expectation of job satisfaction, doing something what you believe etc. rises with time and is pretty high towards the end of PhD. However, no job in the world probably provides that. Somebody who does not want to stay in academics for long, somebody who likes to face practical challenges rather than to work with pen and paper has few options left other than entrepreneurship. It gives us the golden opportunity to work for the society as well as work like free birds trying to make their mark on the world sky. Our motivation lies in the fact that most of us want to do something for the society at the grass root level and aim to make a mark connecting the upper strata of the society with the bottom strata. The village life which we have ourselves seen and the amalgamation of the technological knowledge and inspiration which we have got in IIT Kharagpur, made us believe that the only difference between villages and cities is the technology. Agriculture can be as profitable as any well paying job, if done through proper technology; similarly, cities can be as clean as villages with the proper channelized technology reaching them on time.
Whatever we seek from you will be very less in comparison to what you can provide us with, and hence we would personally like to thank on our behalf for any kind of help that you forward us.
From our esteemed alumni spread around all over the world, we would first humbly like to say that we are really very new and inexperienced in the Industry. We may have lots of dreams and wishes, but all of that will never be true without your able guidance and help.
The first and foremost thing we expect from our Alumni is to be with us and guide us. Your words are really valuable in every step of our journey. We strongly believe that in the real industry, your contact base and friends are the ones who come for real help. So this is our first step to build that base and reach out to all the corners of the world where our seniors have already made our institute proud. We would like to take this as an opportunity to get hold about the current scenario of the waste-management, agricultural development, and green technology related industries around the world. We are really eager to hear from all of you through whichever means possible.
Apart from your help and guidance, it would be really helpful if you can guide us regarding the consultancy projects and the field of techno-consultancy in green technology.
We believe, there is a lot to learn from you all, and you are the only ones who can help us with knowledge, contacts, funding options, investment guidance and any other sort of warning and tips which you think we as young minds should be aware of.
We shall be eagerly waiting to hear from you all, and would be expecting at least a critical comment on our work so far. Every of your word is most valuable to us.

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