About Without®

We re-engineer impossible waste into materials with a soul.

Chip packets, sachets and torn, mixed textiles are the waste almost nobody recycles. We turn them into materials brands can build with, and we build the company around the people closest to that waste.

Meet the team See our impact

Certified B Corporation
3 patents granted, 5 pending
Made at the Cradle, Pune

01 · The problems we solve

Waste nobody recycles, and the people closest to it.

Three problems, tangled together. We work on all three at once, because solving one alone does not last.

Multi-layer plastic

<1%

of flexible plastic packaging is recycled worldwide

Chip packets, sachets and wrappers are three to five layers of plastic, aluminium and paper, fused together.
Flexible plastics cause around 80% of ocean plastic leakage.
Most of it is burned, buried or mixed into cement, and the material is lost for good.

Waste-picker poverty

1.5-4 million

waste-pickers in India live multidimensionally poor lives, and 15-20 million worldwide

Most work informally: no contract, no protective gear, no health insurance.
Many earn between Rs 3,000 and Rs 12,000 a month, paid daily by the type of waste they find.
It is often generational: a waste-picker’s child is likely to become one too.

Mixed textile waste

92 million tonnes

of textile waste is produced every year

Just 12% of the material used for clothing is recycled.
Around 60% of textile waste is synthetic, which means plastic.
The hardest part is torn, soiled, mixed-fibre waste that even collectors reject.

Figures from the Without® Impact Report 2024.

02 · What we do

Three things. Never separately.

Each one fails on its own. Together they compound: the materials pay for the work with people, and the work with people is what makes the materials different.

Re-engineer impossible waste

Multi-layer packaging and mixed textiles are recycled at a rate close to zero. Our patented VerdiCycle process recovers them at up to 120°C, using water and no burning, as three materials: VerdiFLX, VerdiPTA and VerdiMIX.

How it works

Graduate people out of poverty, for good

The people who sort India’s waste mostly work with no contract and no safety net. We employ them formally, at two to three times their previous income, with ESOPs, health insurance and training. Foundation Without® works with their families on a 24-month graduation programme.

Meet the people

Rethink how a company is built

Profit is how we keep going, not the reason we exist. We are a Certified B Corporation, we report our impact honestly, including where we fall short, and our founder writes a letter every quarter on how it is really going.

Read the letters

03 · Why we exist

One vision. Two missions.

Our vision

A thriving world made without poverty, where every person has dignity, equal opportunity, and access to education, healthcare and decent living standards, while contributing positively to the planet.

The company

Mission one

Increase the value of waste ethically, by using technology to convert it into high-quality, scalable, planet-positive resources, while deeply empowering and formalising the informal economy that drives the industry.

Our technology

The non-profit

Mission two

Permanently graduate multidimensionally poor households, starting with India’s waste-picking communities, into secure, dignified livelihoods that enable agency, safety and stability.

Visit Foundation Without®

Revenue from Made Without® funds the work of Foundation Without®. The trust built by Foundation Without® is what makes Made Without® possible.

04 · Our story

From one pair of sunglasses to a plant.

Each step started as something the industry had written off.

Feb 2023
Sunglasses from chip packets

The world’s first. The first batch sold out within a week, and more than 100 publications around the world covered it.
2025
A bottle made from sachets

We made the world’s first 100% recycled sachet bottle, and were one of four winners of L’Oréal’s 2025 Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Programme across SAPMENA.
Oct 2025
The Cradle opens

Our first-of-a-kind demonstration plant in Pune, where science, product, manufacturing and growth work under one roof.
May 2026
Yarn from soiled textiles

Recycled polyester made from soiled, mixed textile waste reached yarn-grade quality on our first attempt.

05 · Our long-term goal

A network, not a single plant.

Waste collected close to where it is thrown away, recovered nearby, and turned into materials worth more than the waste ever was. Three layers, working as one.

Layer 1 · Close to the waste

Collection hubs

Small, local units where plastic waste is collected, washed, shredded and given its first sort, by people who are formally employed.

Collected close to where it is thrown away
Washed and shredded
A first sort before it travels

Layer 2 · Near the hubs

Recovery plants

VerdiCycle plants that extract the materials, depolymerise what can be depolymerised and sort everything by polymer.

Layers separated at up to 120°C, with water
PET taken back to its building blocks
Everything sent on as material, not waste

Layer 3 · At the centre

Centres for science and making

Central labs that invent, upgrade and share the technology, and manufacturing units that do the complex, large-scale work.

Research that keeps improving the process
Computational chemistry and AI to speed up experiments
Compounding, moulding and polymerisation

Choose a layer, or tap the map.

What holds it together

Every kind of plastic

The ambition is to process all of it, not just the easy fraction.

Formalise and empower

The informal sector is formalised and empowered along the way.

Collaboration

No one can do this alone.

Financially sustainable

Related entities that each pay their own way.

06 · How we work

What we believe, and how we work.

Three principles, three values and four habits. They are how we decide, especially when it is hard.

Our principles

Why

Impact first
We exist to solve systemic social and environmental problems, and that always comes first.
Good economics
Markets and incentives work. An impact business should pay its own way, because donor dependency can be a crutch.
Long-term outlook
We build for permanent progress: deep impact first, then scaling that depth over time.

Our values

Who

Pursuing truth
Self-aware, data-driven and compassionately honest. Fairness and transparency are not optional.
Realistically optimistic
Optimism is a can-do mentality grounded in reality, not blind faith.
Working hard and smart
Outcomes matter, and so do processes. Hours on the clock do not. We pair short-term impatience with long-term patience.

Our habits

How

Pace
We want to compress years of research into one, without breaking things on the way.
Outcomes
Our hours are flexible. What we do with them is not.
Explicit
Nothing gets swept under the rug. We are our own biggest critics.
Grounded
No task is too small or too big for any of us. We play to our strengths and keep an open mind.

Keep going

Meet the people doing the work.

Scientists, engineers, operators and storytellers, most of them in Pune. Or talk to us about what you want to make.

Meet the team Talk to us