Every aspect of our life as gone digital in the past decade — from food and shopping to personal assistants to healthcare — we have everything online. So why not waste? What would the modern-day reincarnation of kabadiwala be like? Crapbin, a Hyderabad-based waste management start-up which collects, segregates and recycles waste, has made waste disposal easier than ever and more environment-friendly.
Nisar Ahmed (29), Muquayyar Ahmed (29) and Zuber Quresh (26) are three brothers who founded Crapbin in November 2018. Nisar had six years of experience in the waste management sector in Dubai, while Muquayyar was into corporate management for the past five years and Zuber, a data scientist, ideated the concept. "The idea clicked when my mother asked me to get rid of scrap from our house. It took me around 10 days to get it done," says Zuber. "The first hurdle was that it is an arduous and taxing job, also it is quite irritating. When I asked a local kabadiwala to come and pick up the scrap, he refused and asked me to bring it all to his shop. Even then he didn't take the electronic waste. After this ordeal of an experience I thought when everything else is being done online, why not we have a scrap pickup service online," adds Zuber.
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But the major motivation for the trio to take up the project was protecting the environment, "As people find it difficult to go to the local kabadiwala to dispose of their waste, they ultimately throw it all in dump yards, rivers and landfills. All we wanted to do was to give them the last stage convenience for disposing of their dry waste easily. After two long years of extensive research on waste management and a concrete plan to execute it, we started Crapbin in 2018."
The Crapbin team collects the scrap from the household and transports it to their yard, "Our team will then segregate the scrap based on material and then each material gets compressed and finally sent to our authorised recycling partners. Local kabadiwalas don't have fixed rates, but we offer standard market rates for all the items and those are mentioned on our website," says Zuber, a 26-year-old mechanical engineering graduate.
Improper and irresponsible treatment of waste is the biggest threat to the environment at the moment, feels the young entrepreneurs.
Refrigerators, ACs and washing machines contain metal, plastics contain potentially harmful substances such as chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbon (CFC/HCFC), which have high ozone-depletion potential. Metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium, if abandoned, can cause damage to the central and peripheral nervous systems and affect brain development in children, as well as harm the circulatory system, kidneys and reproductive system of a human being. The Crapbin team also advocates for a cleaner tomorrow.
Plastic which takes more than 1000 years to decompose, is a great threat to the marine animal, add the young guns. "This is a need of an hour for an aam aadmi to be conscious about the environment and take responsible steps to reduce pollution. We must start using things that are recyclable and reusable — use the reusable cloth bag instead of using polythenes for groceries items. Whatever waste is generated people must dispose it with responsibly instead of dumping anywhere which ends up on landfills," says Zuber. "We are working on dry waste in Hyderabad and Secunderabad, our next move will be to take up wet waste decomposition. Coming to the expansion, we have the plan to start this service in Pune, Maharashtra soon," he adds.
