(Note: I solemnly swear this letter was not generated by AI.)
Dear Friend of Without,
This is what Midhun texted in our Science WhatsApp group last month:
Today was something I’ll not forget for a while. 🫡
Stood there watching a filament thinner than a human hair spinning at 600 rpm and not snapping even a little bit. 🤏
@Lok, @Anish I genuinely wish you were there. That moment is polymer science at its absolute peak and I don’t think any textbook does it justice.
Fibre spinning is a beautiful science whole by itself and today I saw it with my own eyes.
This was not any conventional fibre.
This was fibre spun out of the worst textile waste – the stuff that even waste collectors reject, let alone thrift shops – the torn, soiled, rejected, blended, mixed kinds of cloth that we gag at. The skiddy underwear that you don’t know where your mother throws away. The torn cloth your house-help uses to clean the dining table way too many times, that nobody wants to know what to do with once it’s too damn dirty to even look at.
We re-engineered it.
This was fibre that Midhun and the team, old and new, had worked on for years. And it didn’t just look nice, it tested well as well – virgin grade on almost all parameters.
Virgin-grade recycled polyester yarn polymerised from monomers extracted from the worst textiles, something I don’t think anyone in the world has done. We did this on our first polymerisation attempt, from a pesky lab on the fringes of Pune, courtesy of our patent-pending purification process that doesn’t use recrystallisation or solvents.
But Anish, don’t y’all recycle packets of chips?
Yes, yes, you’re right. But our process (and our demo plant) works with the worst textiles as well. Both provide the same monomer, which we can polymerise into a variety of esters.
So, technically, yes, we could also make your t-shirt out of packets of chips, but the apparel industry wants the “loop” to be closed and pays a higher premium for yarn made from recycled yarn. We’ll polymerise chip packets into auto parts, perhaps, which honestly is a better use of that monomer.
This is probably the hardest thing we’ve done, even harder than those sunglasses from packets of chips. We’ll shout more about this soon.
*****
Another thing has started to sprout: Foundation Without.
Over the years, we’ve learnt that it’s not the poor who collect waste. It’s the waste that collects the poor.
When migrants move into the city, full of hope, there’s only one job that doesn’t really require papers or an interview: waste-picking. Collect a few bottles and get some money in return – easy peasy, right?
It’s on this backbone that most recyclers thrive. The desperation of waste-work means that you’re going to probably take what you get. And that keeps the price of collection really low, allowing the more fortunate to milk the margins.
That’s not right, nor is it truly sustainable.
And a “waste-picker” is never just a waste-picker. They hobble up and down on the ladders (and snakes) of informality. A waste-picker today, a sweeper tomorrow, a rented rickshaw driver the day after (if you’re lucky), only for a loan-shark to gut you back into waste-picking, or prostitution.
I don’t think waste-picking and informality should exist in a fair society. We can do better.
And that’s what Foundation Without aims to champion. It’s not different from the Without vision, just an extension of the work that we already do at Without. Something that goes deeper. Something that aspires to scale that depth into a normalcy that better mirrors the society we want to build.
So, while Made Without tries to make the worst waste valuable ethically, Foundation Without doubles down on building the social trampoline that our urban poor don’t have. Tp be sure, our goal is to set this trampoline up, not to make the urban poor jump on it – that’s on them.
And leading this is Avanti. A person with more heart than the bodies of thousands, who’s figuring out how to complement that with the savvy of being a good operator. I wouldn’t want anyone else leading this charge.
I’ll leave you with our vision and missions, the short versions:
- The Without Vision: A thriving world made without poverty.
- The Made Without Mission: To increase the value of waste, ethically.
- The Foundation Without Mission: To permanently graduate informal urban poor households out of poverty.
They dance together as we build a template of how we think most organisations of the future should be built.
I’m still not sure if we’ll succeed, but we are going to God-damn try.
*****
In February, I went back to the US after 6 years, thanks to the good fortune of the Yale Climate Fellowship.
It felt surreal being back where I had spent the most consequential decade of my life so far.
Could I still relate to it? Would I miss it? How would it feel meeting my friends again? My old colleagues? American investors?
I think I blended in well, flexing my adaptation muscles again, but this time with a lot more familiarity.
I met long-lost friends with whom I used to rage in college and in the city. They were now married with kids. A lot of things were different, but it also felt like a lot hadn’t changed between us.
I met old colleagues, doing well, and dancing up the ladder I had chosen to leap off.
I met new folks, like Paul Simons, the architect behind the Yale Climate Fellow program, who left me overwhelmed, reminding me that there are people out there who serve with all their heart and just for the greater good (more on him and that later).
I met investors, curious to see how they would react to what we were doing. The question from my imposter had been lingering: could this start-up in a pesky lab in the fringes of Pune really compete with the Valley of the West?
Turns out that we can outcompete.
And all I could think about was coming back to Pune and continuing to build what we are building.
There are times when I feel like I’m being stretched into a filament thinner than human hair, just like our yarn. But I am not ready to snap. I’m ready for it to be spun.
Thank you for following along,
Anish
*****
