The Better India · 6 hours ago

How Rituricha Jain Built a Startup That Turns 140 Tonnes of Waste Into Tree-Free Paper Products Annually

A tree cut down in childhood became the quiet grief that reshaped Rituricha Jain's life. She walked away from a PhD at IIT Bombay when she realized the certainty of academia felt like the wrong kind of safety, choosing instead to follow a question that began with elephant dung paper: what if waste itself could become something meaningful? In 2013, she founded Paperdom, transforming banana stems and textile scraps into journals and stationery at a time when "no one cared about sustainability," only cost. Now recycling 140 tonnes of waste annually, she has proven that seeing differently - finding possibility in what others discard - can honor both the trees we've lost and the ones we might save. "We are trying to give banana fibres and textile waste a second life and a new story," she says, and in doing so, she wrote her own.