Entrepreneur Creates World’s First Sunglasses From Recycled Chips Packets

One day while passing through the Chembur landfill in Mumbai, Anish Malpani wondered if all that waste could be turned into something valuable. In his quest, he started researching and found a way to extract high-quality material from plastic waste.

“When I started researching the waste management space in India, I found that there was a poor population of waste-pickers who live multidimensionally poor lives, about 1.4 to 4 million in India. At the same time, there was a lot of untapped potential in waste, with about 50-80 percent of waste ending up in landfill,” he says.

Anish came up with the idea to make the world’s first recycled sunglasses from discarded chips packets and launched a social enterprise Ashaya.

“Besides our sunglasses being made from packets of chips, they are highly functional. They are light in weight, UV polarised, durable, and bendy. When you buy them, you also make a big social impact, 10 percent of your sales go towards keeping children of waste-pickers in school,” he says.

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With his social enterprise, Anish announced its pilot project on Twitter and LinkedIn and in just four days, he received more than 500 orders.

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