When Mani Vajipey quit a lucrative job in the US to form a plastic waste recycling company in India, he started with strong notions of superiority over other nations.India had the best recycling habits in the world, and he considered his job was to strengthen an already good recycling system. “If there is an Olympics for recycling,” says Vajipey, “India will continue winning for a long time.”When he set up Banyan Nation in Hyderabad, he was also sure of a contradictory fact: that India was one of the most visibly affected nations in the world by plastic litter. India has a low plastic consumption per capita, but this consumption is going up steadily and could double within a decade or less. What will happen in a few decades, when its per capita plastic consumption goes up to western levels?Banyan Tree set up a 12,000-tonne capacity plant to process plastic, but it is decommissioning the plant now to focus on high-value recycling: car bumpers and shampoo bottles.Neither is recycled well now, and Vajipey, who has raised $1.2 million so far, is confident of making a business out of recycling high-value products. He has worked with Tata Motors and L’Oréal to demonstrate models of plastic recycling for car bumpers and shampoo bottles.Banyan Tree is able to do this business because of two reasons. It has developed a data intelligence platform —mostly in South India — that can collect recyclable plastic, and a cleaning technology that ensures the input for recycling is of good quality.As the plastic waste menace increases in scale around the world, scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers have begun to come up with solutions that help to reduce it. Some are developing methods for recycling plastics, while others are developing products that are safe and biodegradeable. Some companies are beginning to develop products that are better suited for recycling.Together, these efforts promise an economy that will become increasing circular over the years. At present, PET bottles are among the easiest products to recycle, and it is no wonder that a large number of them are being recycled in India. “If something can be recycled,” says Vajipey, “they will be picked up in India.” A study by Magesh Nandagopal, scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune, found that 60-70% of PET bottles are recycled in India into other products, especially polyester fibres that can be used as textiles.They constitute roughly 900 kilotonnes of products that would have become waste otherwise. The recycled PET bottles become clothing, sofa covers, or pillow stuffing. These products last long and so they have not yet been through a second round of recycling in a large scale.Technology exists to convert PET bottles back into bottles at least once, but Indian regulations do not permit the use of recycled products for storing food and drink. This is because regulators are not confident that recycled PET is as good as the virgin product. A technology from Unilever, now under development, promises to change that.Unilever is among the big companies around the world that have committed to developing 100% recyclable packing by 2025. Used PET bottles are a big problem in the West, as only 20% of them are being recycled. Even when they are recycled, it is hard to make them as good and safe as the original product.In the new process, developed along with the Indian company Indorama Ventures and the startup Ioniqa in the Netherlands, Unilever has developed a process to break down a PET product to its molecular constituents and then reconstitute them to make a bottle that is identical to the original. “We can recycle PET indefinitely,” says Sanjeev Das, global packaging director of Unilever. The product will be ready for commercialization next year.At the moment, no plastic can be recycled indefinitely. However, new recycling methods are being developed that can extend the life of a product. In Pune, Social Seva Initiatives, an environment technology organisation, is trying to develop a process to convert high-density polyethylene waste into filaments that can be used in 3D printing.“Till now no one has been able to use polyethylene for 3D printing,” says Guruswamy Kumaraswamy, scientist at NCL, who has developed the technology that Social Seva Initiatives licensed. This is because of warping of the material as it cools down. “We have now solved the problem of warping,” says Guruswamy.NCL, India’s premier chemistry lab, has a few other scientists working to develop environment-friendly plastics. One project is to find microbeads made of natural polymers. Microbeads, used in detergents and cosmetics, are a major environmental problem, as they leach into oceans and are eaten by fish. Some countries have banned the use of microbeads in all products.Attempts to develop microbeads using shells — of walnuts and apricots — have not been very successful. In NCL, scientists Kadhiravan Shanmuganathan and Anuya Nisal are developing microbeads from natural materials. Nisal is using silk to develop microbeads. “Our prototype is ready and we are now trying to scale economically,” says Nisal.