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Hair oil brand Parachute’s plastic bottle packaging from its previous avatar sold in tin cans changed the way branded coconut oil was sold in India back in the 1980s and has been the subject of multiple case studies. The parent company of Parachute, Marico, which has been looking at mitigating the impact of ubiquitous plastic usage, has now announced its first Plastics Circularity Initiative. 

Formed as part of a joint venture between Marico Chairman Harsh Mariwala’s family office Sharrp Ventures and private equity giant KKR-backed waste management company Re Sustainability, the circularity initiative will set up facilities in Hyderabad and Raipur to capture and process 32,000 tonnes of waste annually. 

“Large innovation is important for any organisation but in this case plastic was used to increase the marketshare,” said Harsh Mariwala, Chairman of Marico, during the announcement of the initiative.

“When I speak about this story, everyone says it was good for you, but what are you doing about the environment, and I would always feel I never had an answer,” he added.

Mariwala said that while nearly 95% of the plastic used by FMCG company Marico for its products is recyclable, lack of segregation and processing makes the availability of good quality recycled plastics difficult to source. 

“The need to increase the use of recycled plastics as mandated by the government, combined by the guilt that I was doing something for the environment, led us to start a project to identify innovations in plastics a year and half back. We identified about 15-16 innovators,” said Mariwala.

He added that Marico Innovation Fund (MIF), the philanthropic arm of Marico, identified Re Sustainability’s Hyderabad operations in Hyderabad for the circularity initiative. 

Sharrp Ventures has taken a 15% equity stake in the joint venture formed with Re Sustainability for the initiative. The protoype in Hyderabad will be set up at a cost of nearly Rs 50 crore, processing nearly 600 tonnes of waste per day. 

The goal of the initiative will be to increase the supply of high-quality recycled polyolefins for the FMCG industry. However, this will require to comply with the new Plastic Waste Management rules for recycling and reuse of plastic content for producers, importers, and brand owners of plastic packaging in a phased manner from FY25. The initiative also aims to evolve into a nationwide large-scale recycled polymers enterprise over the next five years. 

“Integration across all elements of the waste ecosystem–collection, transport, aggregation, sorting, recycling, and then downstream–making high quality recycled material, will make it sustainable. A Parachute bottle should come back into the economy as a Parachute bottle,” said Masood Mallick, Managing Director and CEO of Re Sustainability Limited, during the launch of the initiative.