Mahindra Group – Mervin Jathanna – 2025
Summary
Mervin Rahul Jathanna worked with Mahindra Lifespaces Developers Limited (MLDL) to strengthen the company’s Net Zero Waste vision by developing the first step-by-step waste management handbook for real estate and providing recommendations for improving waste tracking and reporting, including consistent material flow analysis, practical site-level waste reduction, and alignment with circular economy practices.
Goals
Mervin Rahul Jathanna joined Mahindra Lifespaces Developers Limited as a Climate Corps Fellow to advance the company’s journey toward Net Zero Waste. His fellowship set out to address construction waste, one of India’s least explored sustainability challenges. The project goals were to improve the accuracy of waste tracking across all real estate projects of Mahindra Lifespaces, develop the first comprehensive waste management handbook for the sector, and align material management practices with national regulations and circular economy principles. The mandate also included enabling site teams and sustainability champions with practical tools to quantify, manage, and reduce construction waste.
Solutions
To address these goals, Mervin worked across multiple projects that combined on-ground engagement with data analysis. He conducted visits in Bengaluru and Pune to 29+ construction sites and captured stage-wise waste practices, challenges, and feedback directly from site teams. These insights shaped the Waste Management Handbook, designed as a clear and visual guide covering material flows from gate-in to gate-out, supported by stage-wise SOPs and QR code integration. Parallelly, he carried out a mass balance analysis of 25+ materials across MLDL sites using the data from 7 years (2019-2025), comparing purchased materials with recorded waste to identify gaps in reporting and highlight high-impact materials such as concrete, steel, and blocks. He also audited datasets of purchased goods and generated waste from 2019-2025 to detect anomalies, outliers, and inconsistencies, creating a cleanup guide for standardized reporting. He proposed a scalable Power BI dashboard for future integration of purchase and waste data, enabling consistent monitoring across sites. Finally, he mapped regulatory requirements to ensure recommendations were practical.
Potential Impact
The Waste Management Handbook provides India’s first step-by-step field-ready reference for site teams, ensuring consistent practices across construction phases. The mass balance analysis demonstrated how purchased material data can be linked with waste generation, enabling a clearer picture of material efficiency across projects. The audits conducted by Mervin improved data reliability and provided sustainability champions a method to track and address errors systematically. The proposed dashboard and tracking improvements allow Mahindra to scale monitoring across future sites. Together, these outcomes move the company closer to its Net Zero Waste vision while providing a replicable model for the broader real estate industry.
