From waste to worth: Building dignity through green jobs
Entrepreneur Jabir Karat is on a mission to tackle India’s waste crisis while creating safe and dignified jobs for women.
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While completing his Gandhi Fellowship in Mumbai, Jabir Karat came face-to-face with the magnitude of India’s waste crisis. Determined to create change, he set out to build a solution that combined environmental impact with safe jobs, technology, and human dignity.
Today, he leads Green Worms, one of India’s most innovative waste management enterprises. The Acumen investee partners with local governments and women waste pickers to collect, segregate, and process waste, including low-value plastics. It then recycles that waste into valuable materials for domestic and global brands.
Green Worms features prominently in Acumen’s new report, What waste workers want: Lessons from India’s circular economy. In the run-up to the report’s release, we spoke with Jabir about what drew him to waste, how he thinks about embracing technology, and what it will take to scale solutions big enough to address India’s waste problem.
What inspired you to work in the waste sector as an entrepreneur?
I wanted to do something meaningful in life. When I was a Gandhi Fellow in Mumbai, I was exposed to a lot of hard realities on the ground, especially in the development sector. I was also introduced to the idea of social entrepreneurship. I researched the most significant problems our country would face in the next decade. I learned that India had some of the worst sanitation standards in the world, and that 90 percent of our waste ends up in landfills or the ocean. This made me realize the business potential alongside the environmental and social potential. There are millions of people who scavenge through waste across India, and these are people with no safety or status. I spent three months working as a waste picker to familiarize myself with the problem. All these factors came together to inspire Green Worms.
What impact have you had on a local and community level?
We collect waste from 2.3 million households. It’s a huge volume of waste that we’re able to prevent from burning and burying in backyards. At the same time, we work directly with the people we employ and have been able to improve their safety, increase their household income, and pay them consistently. Most importantly, we’ve been able to educate people on why this work is important. We’ve helped create systems and habits like segregation of waste at source.
Community-wise, we’ve shown local government bodies that this is possible. Back in the day, people said it was impossible, that it only works on paper, that households wouldn’t cooperate or that disposal wasn’t feasible. Now there are successful models and working systems. There’s stability and consistency in collection and resource recovery. There used to be small landfills and dumping sites everywhere. Wherever we operate, all those have been shut down.
What is one thing you wish people understood about the lives and occupations of waste workers?
It’s an important job. People often alienate it or look down on it, but it deserves the same respect as any other kind of work. The attitudes toward waste collectors, even from their own families and communities, can be dismissive. But they are doing a respectable job — an important one for the community. Thankfully, more people are starting to realize that.
How do you balance your goals around improving worker welfare and creating better opportunities with the need to adopt more technology and become more efficient in waste collection and recycling?
I believe new technology shouldn’t replace jobs; it should enhance them. For example, if a person currently sorts 200 kilograms of waste per day, adding some automation could raise that to 500 kilograms per day per person. It increases productivity without removing the human element. I focus on improving efficiency so that if someone is doing heavy lifting or sifting waste, equipment can support them. I strongly believe in integrating technology to improve productivity, not to replace people.
There are also business factors like real estate costs. If I’m paying rent on 20,000 square feet and can process 50,000 kilograms per day with 50 people, new technology could help us process 100,000 kilograms with the same number of people. So the goal is to use our space and workforce more efficiently. In collection and transportation, you always need people. Those roles can’t be automated. In processing, I bring in technology not only for cost efficiency but also because, philosophically, I don’t believe people should have to put their hands directly in waste. There should be less human contact with waste materials. So I aim for a middle ground — not 100 percent automation, but not completely manual either. It’s about protecting people while making the system sustainable.
What would it take from governments, investors, or the public to truly unlock the potential of waste enterprises at scale?
A mix of social engineering and unit economics. It’s not a lack of technology or expertise or resources. On the one hand, this is about the waste generators: households. If they do their part well, like segregating from the source, that helps. It needs compliance and regulation because not everyone will do it voluntarily. So there’s a social engineering angle in which government, citizens, and communities have to invest more.
On the other hand, this is about processing. The unit economics are hard. Sustainable waste processing can be expensive, so who funds it? Does the government or brands or the waste-generating firms themselves? That’s the big question, especially at scale. In the last ten years, governments have heavily invested in collection and transportation of waste. But when it comes to processing, there’s still a gap. They’re not spending enough. Much of the focus has been on shifting the problem from public view to somewhere else.
When it comes to investors or capital providers, is there anything that you would want them to do, change, or evolve?
Only in recent years have I seen some traction from institutional investors. The whole industry is still largely informal, and investors need to understand that it takes time to shift to a more formal way of operating. There’s a lot of good work happening, but there are no standards like in agriculture or healthcare. This is not yet a mature sector. Effort is needed from all sides to make it more formal and mainstream. Investors should start believing in this sector, engaging with it more, even though it’s informal.
We also have to work with governments. They’re a critical stakeholder. The more we can influence and engage with governments, the bigger the change will be. Just putting money into enterprises won’t be enough. We need to engage governments effectively, help them address challenges, and think about building the ecosystem together. We need ecosystem enablers and developers. No single enterprise can solve all the problems. Collaboration is essential — between organizations, investors, and governments.
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