An Ahmedabad-based startup is trying to solve India's trash crisis. Started by two students, Harshil Patel and Rikin Parekh, SegReClaim aims to use artificial intelligence to sort waste disposal.
India generates over 62 million tonnes of solid waste every year, but segregation at the source remains an issue. Municipalities spend hundreds of crores to create manual sorting yards at landfills. But mixed trash often sits in the sun for hours, leading to high-value recyclable materials becoming contaminated or worthless.
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SegReClaim aims to change this.
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An Idea For A Startup
The idea for the venture started when Patel visited regional waste-to-energy facilities and local municipal dump yards in the final year of his B.Tech in Computer Engineering.
The systemic dysfunction, mountains of plastic bottles, and decaying piles of kitchen scrap were part and parcel of the landscape. At the waste-to-energy plants, expensive machinery kept jamming due to metal cans lying unsegregated in the waste piles.
Patel told the Rising Story, "We spend billions trying to clean up mixed garbage after it has already rotted in a truck. The battle is lost in the first three seconds-the exact moment someone drops an item into a public trash bin."
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He decided to change his approach. Patel and his classmate Parekh decided to focus on sorting waste in a manner that was automatic, mechanical, and took place at the drop-off point. They made a heavy, automated smart bin that worked on edge computing and computer vision.
The machine captures high-speed images of the item dropped in the bin, classifies it into mixed or single-item deposits, segregates plastic, glass, paper, and metal into separate clean chambers and offers reward credits to the user, all within three seconds.
SegReClaim was awarded an Rs 70,000 grant under the Student Startup and Innovation Policy (SSI) of Gujarat to build its first working AI smart bin prototype.
Patel and Parikh purchased industrial-grade microcontrollers, changed their camera modules, and fabricated a reinforced sheet-metal casing that could withstand public use.
They tested the product successfully at Indus University and later moved it to IIT Gandhinagar.
What's Next For The Startup?
It remains a pre-seed startup operating with one working machine, no institutional equity funding, and massive challenges ahead. The duo plan to help bring the device to Indian streets and landfills to create a cleaner India.
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