Startup Deep Dive : Saahas Zero Waste — its revenue fell by a third when India’s EPR rules shifted

Saahas Zero Waste turned Bengaluru’s garbage into a ₹86 crore (~$9.0 million) business by FY24, one of the larger formal revenue lines among India’s waste-management social enterprises. Two years later that number had slipped by close to a third, even though the company was still picking up roughly the same 100 tonnes of waste every day.

The gap says something founder Wilma Rodrigues has argued for 25 years: the money in waste is almost never in the waste itself. Saahas earns most of its revenue from fees for handling material nobody wants to buy, and when India’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules shifted in FY25 and FY26, that fee stream took the hit. The company chose to absorb the loss rather than cut headcount or the recovery rate its reputation rests on.

Quick facts

What they do

Saahas Zero Waste is a Bengaluru-headquartered waste-management company that runs decentralised, onsite and offsite resource-recovery programmes for bulk waste generators — corporate campuses, tech parks, residential complexes and institutions — while separately helping brand owners meet their Extended Producer Responsibility obligations for plastic and e-waste. As of its most recent public disclosures, it processes more than 100 tonnes of solid waste a day across 50-plus cities and 20-plus states, for over 100 paying clients including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, IKEA Social Enterprise, WWF and Thapar University, with a claimed landfill-diversion rate above 96% (YourStory, August 2025).

The origin

Wilma Rodrigues came to waste management from journalism, not engineering or logistics. Her interest in the environment was shaped on India’s trekking trails through the 1980s, but the specific idea for Saahas traces to a regulatory moment: India’s first Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules, notified in 2000, which for the first time treated waste as a resource rather than only a civic nuisance to be dumped. “It was the first time waste was acknowledged as a resource,” Rodrigues has said of that period. Motivated by the gap between the new rules and the reality on the ground, she launched Saahas as a not-for-profit in Bengaluru in 2001, running awareness and segregation campaigns aimed at households, schools and offices. One of the NGO’s early institutional relationships, with the State Bank of India, later became the new company’s first paying customer once Saahas moved into a commercial model — a detail the company still highlights as proof that its social-sector credibility translated into a client relationship (Saahas Zero Waste, About Us).

The struggle years

The first setback was one of pace, not a single dramatic failure: it took twelve years, from 2001 to 2013, for Rodrigues to move from awareness campaigns to a scalable commercial entity. Advocacy alone did not fix the underlying economics of India’s waste system, and it became clear, in the company’s own retrospective account, that only “scale and systems” would move the needle — which is what pushed the eventual registration of Saahas Waste Management Pvt Ltd, branded Saahas Zero Waste, in 2013 (YourStory, August 2025).

The second setback came much later and was financial rather than structural. Saahas Zero Waste’s revenue peaked at about ₹86 crore in FY24. Over the following two fiscal years it slipped to around ₹60 crore, with the company posting marginal losses in both years. Rodrigues, speaking publicly in July 2026, attributed the fall directly to “churn in EPR regulations” — changes to the compliance framework that a meaningful share of the company’s fee revenue depends on — and said Saahas chose to absorb the financial hit rather than dilute its environmental and social commitments, for instance by cutting wages or headcount (YourStory, July 2026). Unsoftened, that is close to a one-third revenue decline inside two years, in a business that never had large capital reserves to begin with: total funding raised across its history is only around ₹7-8 crore.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Saahas Zero Waste’s history sits around 2017 to 2019. In 2017 the company opened its first Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Bengaluru, moving it from ad hoc collection routes to a proper sorting and aggregation infrastructure. In May 2019, that facility and the model behind it attracted a ₹6 crore funding round led by Capital 4 Development Partners (C4D Partners), with Indian Angel Network, Artha India Ventures and Asha Impact participating — money the company said would go toward enhancing collection and aggregation of non-biodegradable waste, including low-grade plastics (YourStory, May 2019). At the time of that round, Saahas Zero Waste had 248 staff, was processing 45 tonnes of waste a day, and had reported 50% revenue growth in the prior fiscal year (FY19). By the time of its most recent disclosures in 2025 and 2026, headcount had grown to more than 400, daily volumes to over 100 tonnes, and its footprint to 50-plus cities and 20-plus states (YourStory, May 2019; YourStory, August 2025). The MRF and the funding that followed it did not make the company profitable, but they were the inflection point that took Saahas from a single-city recovery operation to a multi-state, multi-vertical business.

The money behind it

• May 2019 round, ₹6 crore: led by C4D Partners, with Indian Angel Network, Artha India Ventures and Asha Impact participating; earmarked for materials-recovery infrastructure and expansion into South and West India (YourStory, May 2019).
• Total raised to date: roughly ₹7-8 crore. Rodrigues has put the cumulative figure at “about Rs 8 crore” from what she called “aligned investors” willing to be patient (YourStory, July 2026); external trackers CB Insights and Tracxn separately estimate cumulative funding at approximately $860,000-865,000 across two to three rounds, which converts to a broadly similar range at historical exchange rates.
• What the capital funded: senior leadership hires, an internal MIS/traceability system, and the Bengaluru materials-recovery facility — compliance and operating infrastructure rather than customer acquisition or marketing (YourStory, August 2025).
• Valuation: not disclosed at any round; Saahas Zero Waste remains privately held with no reported mark-to-market valuation.
• Forward plan: management is targeting a ₹200 crore revenue business within five years of 2026, and is exploring a shift toward a “steward ownership” governance structure rather than a conventional investor exit (YourStory, July 2026).

How it makes money

• Zero Waste Programme (ZWP): a retainer-style service for bulk waste generators — tech parks, campuses, residential complexes — covering onsite and offsite collection, segregation, processing and recycling (company website; YourStory, July 2026).
• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR): compliance-as-a-service for producers and brand owners who must meet plastic- and e-waste recycling obligations under India’s Plastic Waste Management Rules.
• Circle Up: a closed-loop retail arm that sells upcycled and recycled products back to communities and institutions.
• Revenue mix: about 40% of revenue comes from selling recovered material to recyclers and consumers; the larger remaining share is service fees, because roughly 70% of the waste Saahas handles by volume has no resale value at all (Rodrigues, YourStory, July 2026).
• The part people get wrong: the popular “waste to wealth” narrative assumes recyclers make their money reselling scrap. Rodrigues has said this directly: the fee for managing worthless waste, not the resale of valuable waste, is what keeps the business running — and capital markets under-invest in the sector partly because they misunderstand this (YourStory, July 2026).
• Fee schedule: no public per-tonne rate card was found; pricing is set per bulk-generator contract — this detail is cut as unverifiable.

The numbers

• FY24 revenue of ~₹86 crore and the subsequent slide are as reported by Wilma Rodrigues, Chief Transformation Officer, at YourStory’s MSME Sparks 2026 keynote (July 2026); Saahas Waste Management’s own MCA filings, summarised by corporate-data platform Tofler, place FY24 operating revenue within a broad ₹1-100 crore disclosure band, which is consistent with, though does not independently pin down, the company-stated figure.
• Company-stated context for FY19: revenue grew 50% year-on-year, though no absolute rupee figure for that year was published (YourStory, May 2019) — cut from the table because it cannot be expressed in the same ₹ crore unit without an invented base number.
• No third-party audited profit-and-loss statement was found in public filings at the time of writing; all profit/loss figures above are company-stated, not audited.

Where the money comes from

• By revenue type: ~40% material sales to recyclers and consumers; the larger remaining share from service and compliance fees (Rodrigues, YourStory, July 2026).
• By geography: operations span 50-plus cities and 20-plus states, headquartered in Bengaluru, with the 2019 funding round specifically expanding reach into South and West India (company website; YourStory, May 2019).
• By waste stream: a claimed 96%+ landfill-diversion rate in FY25, with 40,000 tonnes diverted in the most recently reported year across recycling, composting, biogas and reuse channels (YourStory, July 2026).
• By client concentration: large corporate campuses and tech parks are a disproportionate source of volume — Rodrigues has said nearly 40% of Bengaluru’s total waste originates from tech parks and other bulk generators, the exact segment the Zero Waste Programme targets (YourStory, July 2026).
• The surprise: EPR is a growing regulatory mandate and, in theory, a durable revenue line, but it has also been the most volatile one — the FY24-to-FY26 revenue slide traces directly to “churn in EPR regulations,” not to any drop in the volume of waste handled (YourStory, July 2026).

The risks

• Informal-sector pricing: India’s large informal waste economy collects and even pays for recyclable material without minimum-wage or safety costs, which structurally undercuts a formal, fee-based, minimum-wage-compliant operator like Saahas Zero Waste on price (Oöko-Institut blog, oeko.de; company disclosures).
• Regulatory churn in EPR: because a meaningful share of revenue depends on the Extended Producer Responsibility compliance framework for plastic and e-waste, changes to registration, credit pricing or enforcement under the Plastic Waste Management Rules can move revenue materially within a single year, as it did between FY24 and FY26 (YourStory, July 2026).
• Policy bias toward incineration: Rodrigues has flagged a “political push for energy-from-waste over recycling” and “weak enforcement of waste segregation laws” as structural barriers, both of which push waste toward landfills or incineration instead of the source-segregated recovery model Saahas is built on, potentially shrinking its addressable, high-recovery volume over time (YourStory, August 2025).

The takeaway

The lesson in Saahas Zero Waste’s numbers is not really about garbage. It is about pricing the part of a service business that is invisible. Founders and investors in this space keep reaching for the “waste to wealth” story, where the product is the recycled material and the money is in the resale. Saahas’s own breakdown of its business says the opposite is true for it: the durable revenue is the fee for collecting, sorting and being accountable for material that has no resale value at all, and that fee line is what actually keeps 400-plus jobs running. When a regulatory shift disrupted that fee stream, the company’s response was to protect the underlying compliance and traceability infrastructure and absorb a loss, rather than protect margins by cutting the workforce. Any founder building a business around an underpriced public good — waste, water, informal labour formalisation — should take the same view: the moat is the accountability layer, not the commodity.

Frequently asked questions

What does Saahas Zero Waste do?

It is a Bengaluru-based waste-management company that runs onsite and offsite resource-recovery programmes for bulk waste generators, provides Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) compliance services for plastic and e-waste producers, and sells upcycled and recycled products through a closed-loop retail arm called Circle Up (company website).

Who founded Saahas Zero Waste, and when?

Journalist-turned-entrepreneur Wilma Rodrigues founded the not-for-profit Saahas in Bengaluru in 2001, then registered the for-profit Saahas Waste Management Pvt Ltd, branded Saahas Zero Waste, in 2013 (YourStory, August 2025).

How does Saahas Zero Waste make money?

About 40% of revenue comes from selling recovered material to recyclers and consumers. The larger remaining share is service fees for managing waste that has no resale value, since roughly 70% of the material the company handles cannot be profitably resold (Rodrigues, YourStory, July 2026).

How much funding has Saahas Zero Waste raised?

Founder Wilma Rodrigues has put total funding at about ₹8 crore from “aligned investors,” including a ₹6 crore round in May 2019 led by C4D Partners with Indian Angel Network, Artha India Ventures and Asha Impact. External trackers CB Insights and Tracxn separately estimate cumulative funding at roughly $860,000-865,000 (YourStory, May 2019 and July 2026; CB Insights/Tracxn).

Is Saahas Zero Waste profitable?

Not currently, by the company’s own account. Revenue peaked at about ₹86 crore in FY24 before slipping to around ₹60 crore, with marginal losses, in the two fiscal years that followed — a dip the company attributes to churn in EPR regulations (Rodrigues, YourStory, July 2026).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• YourStory, “Saahas Zero Waste: Leading India’s Circular Economy Revolution,” August 2025.
• YourStory, “Waste is a resource, not a liability: Wilma Rodrigues of Saahas Zero Waste,” July 2026.
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Waste management startup Saahas Zero Waste raises Rs 6 cr,” May 2019.
• Saahas Zero Waste, company website, “About Us,” accessed September 2026.
• Öko-Institut (oeko.de), “Waste Management in India: A Woman Fights for the Circular Economy,” accessed September 2026.
• Tofler, “Saahas Waste Management Private Limited” financial filing summary, accessed September 2026.
• CB Insights and Tracxn, Saahas Zero Waste funding profiles, accessed September 2026.
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026.

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.