In 2018, Ajinkya Chikte, 32, and wife Seepi Gupta took a diving trip to Havelock in the Andaman Islands, and discovered a new type of jellyfish. Little did he know, the invertebrate he swam close to was a blob of plastic trash floating 25 meters below the surface. "That really got my goat. I decided that I had to do something about the trash problem," he recalls.

A couple of months into looking for a concrete solution, Versova-based Chikte thought of launching a setup based on a circular economy. "Instead of selling unfamiliar products to people and expecting them to adopt these products, I chose to sell familiar buys to people in a new format and help them adopt a new habit—the habit of returning empty bottles and containers. That’s the basic thought behind the idea of creating a circular economy—recovering materials for recycling, reuse, and recirculation," he explains. Chikte has two recycling partner companies—one for harder plastic such as bottles and another for soap covers, etc.