EcoSattva Environmental Solutions Pvt Ltd – Bijit Deb – 2025
Summary
Bijit Deb worked with EcoSattva Environmental Solutions at their Textile Recovery Facility in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenue by strengthening both forward and downward linkages’advancing a financially and environmentally sustainable approach to textile waste management.
Goals
Bijit Deb, an MBA student at IIT Roorkee, joined EcoSattva Environmental Solutions to support its Textile Recovery Facility (TRF) in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. The TRF seeks to divert textile waste from landfills and incineration by sorting, reusing, and upcycling discarded clothing. Bijit’s project aimed to tackle key challenges related to cloth quality, buyer linkages, underutilized resources, and financial viability. The goal was to identify actionable strategies and scalable models to improve TRF’s operational efficiency, economic sustainability, and alignment with circular economy principles.
Solutions
To address TRF’s challenges, Deb adopted a multifaceted approach. He visited TRF often, and identified operational inefficiencies and proposed solutions like better cloth segregation, quality control, and using mini washers for cleaning wipes. He collected and analysed 18 months of performance data to understand the pain point and subsequently built a revenue model showing how the TRF could break even by December 2025 through product diversification and volume growth. He engaged with vendors, helped establish a new wipes supply order, and supported the launch of a public-facing Green Booth to raise awareness. He also helped the TRF in procuring machines like wipe cutting machine and shredding machine by keeping the future demand in mind. He also made the TRF digitally visible by creating a WhatsApp business profile and listing on IndiaMart. He also conceptualized Skill as a Service (SaaS) model where he used stitching as a service and made upcycled products from existing downcycled material, adding a high-value reuse stream.
Potential Impact
During Bijit Deb’s tenure, the TRF secured recurring monthly orders for over 300 kg of cotton wipes and collected more than 392 kg of clothing through the newly launched Green Booth. If fully implemented, his recommendations could enable the TRF to break even by December 2025, while improving recovery rates and expanding into higher-value product categories. Interventions like tailored resale, wipe washing, and cloth grading have the potential to reduce rejection rates and build stronger buyer confidence. More broadly, the fellowship contributed to operationalizing a replicable, community-driven circular economy model for textile waste’balancing environmental impact with long-term financial sustainability.
