This 19-year-old’s startup crushes used glass back into sand for commercial use
The HinduThat empty glass bottle, which once played host to a bubbly beverage, has lived a full life. “Started in 2018, it’s a zero-waste ecosystem that stops glass bottles from being dumped in landfills and crushes them into commercially valuable silica sand,” explains Udit, who in September 2020 was selected by the United Nations as one of 17 Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals. A 16-year-old then, he observed a looming crisis in Delhi and concluded that bulk of the glass waste, despite being recyclable and reusable, was not being segregated and was being dumped into already scarce landfill space “where it won’t decompose for a million years!” “I imported the innovative technology that crushes bottles into sand, from New Zealand. With bottles changing form to sand, any possibility of counterfeiting is also ‘crushed’,” adds the 19-year-old who is currently studying at University College London. So far, 14,000 glass bottles have already been stopped from entering landfills and crushed into 8,400 kilograms of high-grade silica sand, says Udit.
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