Green Worms Waste Management began with an ambition that felt almost too idealistic to succeed. But then again, that’s how change begins, right? In 2014, a young Gandhi Fellow and an entrepreneur named Jabir Karat was shaken by India’s apathy towards its waste crisis. So he did something that was an eye-opener for him. He became a waste picker to understand what people were throwing away, who handled it, and what it meant to those who had no choice but to live among it.
That journey brought him back to his hometown near Kozhikode, where he decided to take matters into his own hands. He launched a one-man venture grounded in the belief that India’s waste crisis could be tackled. He imagined a Kerala where waste wasn’t piled up on the corners of the streets, plastic didn’t block marine life, and waste work was treated not as menial labour but as an essential public service.

However, his good intentions didn’t immediately translate into results. When Jabir and a few friends began collecting waste in 2014, their efforts were met with scepticism. The idea of decentralised, scientific, community-driven waste management was unfamiliar, and their work drew more confusion than cooperation.
“There was very little community support in the beginning. There was hardly any awareness, no real technological infrastructure, and mostly, very little trust,” says Faheema, a current team member who joined Green Worms two years ago. “Eventually, the team had to pause and rethink.” But that break, rather than being a sign of failure, became a period of deep research for Jabir.
He spent the time researching, learning from global models, and thinking deeply about how to build something sustainable. When Green worms resumed operations two years later, it did so with a renewed clarity of purpose: to build a circular waste economy in Kerala that both managed solid waste and empowered the people who handled it.
“We narrowed our efforts to managing and recycling non-biodegradable solid waste,” Faheema explains. “We began collaborating with local governments, integrating with the Haritha Karma Sena networks, and building facilities that could process plastic materials with scientific precision.” Together, they built material recovery facilities and employed local women, offering them dignified, paid roles as waste collectors and sorters.
“We called them waste-preneurs,” Faheema says. Today, Green Worms employs over 650 people directly and supports more than 2,800 waste-preneurs across Kerala. Over 75 per cent of them are women. More than 72 per cent have seen a direct increase in income. These numbers matter because they are proof that waste work, when respected and resourced, can lift communities.
Also Read: Carbon and Whale: How Three Friends Are Turning Kerala’s Plastic Waste Into Purpose

From a modest start of processing just 300 kilograms of waste daily, Green Worms now manages over 180 tonnes of waste every single day. With eight major Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) operating in Kannur, Kozhikode, Kochi, and Malappuram, Green Worms has become one of Kerala’s largest decentralised waste recovery networks.
How does Green Worms Handle Waste?
Waste at these MRFs is sorted into more than twenty categories. Plastic alone is broken down by type, density, and contamination level. “Not all plastic is created equal,” Faheema says. “Multi-layered packaging is almost impossible to recycle. And if food waste seeps into otherwise clean materials, the whole batch is ruined.”

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic added layers of complexity. As households adopted convenience-driven habits, the nature of waste itself began to shift. Mixed waste, particularly that which combined plastic with organic or medical residue, became more common. And in this mix of an increase in plastic waste during COVID-19 times, the team noticed something else: a growing volume of textile waste.
“We observed that nearly three per cent of our plant waste was textile-based. That might sound small, but in terms of volume and impact, it was significant,” Faheema says. That’s why, in 2023, Green Worms launched a dedicated textile recovery unit, a first-of-its-kind initiative that would soon grow into one of its most ambitious arms.
The following year, they amplified it with a statewide campaign called Kuppayam, a 45-day Instagram initiative promoting slow fashion and textile circularity. People from across Kerala began sending used clothing. Green worms installed shredders, turned old fabric into raw material, and began supporting small businesses that made upcycled products. What began as a reaction to waste has evolved into a textile recovery ecosystem to train entrepreneurs, power startups, and create new use cycles for discarded clothing.
Check It Out: Why Our Children Are Going To Be The Luckiest
What about the plastic that cannot be saved?
There’s always waste that resists purpose, such as food-soaked packaging, oily plastic wrappers, or multi-layered snack packs that no one can break down. This is what the industry calls reject waste. In a state with no large-scale incinerators and where landfills are ecologically untenable, Green Worms adopted an alternative. They began shredding reject waste into refuse-derived fuel (RDF), supplying it to cement factories and brick kilns as an alternative energy source. It’s not a perfect solution, but in the absence of high-grade infrastructure, it helps keep the worst waste out of rivers, oceans, and landfills.
“Our goal is to meet the circular economy in full,” Faheema says. “Nothing should end up in the ocean. Nothing should go ignored.”

In 2025, Green Worms went a step further by launching Kerala’s first and largest flexible plastic recycling facility. It was a major leap in tackling the most difficult category of plastic waste. The new facility turns low-grade films, like e-commerce packaging, into usable plastic granules that are then repurposed into new products. “Now, we convert them into plastic granules, which can be used to manufacture products like Amazon or Flipkart covers.”
Waste Generation begins at home
Still, the real challenge lies not in processing waste but in how it’s generated. And for that, Green Worms believes in starting at the source.
Even in a relatively progressive state like Kerala, most households don’t segregate wet and dry waste properly. That single failure can render entire batches of material useless. “People assume that once they’ve paid a user fee to Haritha Karma Sena, it’s no longer their problem,” Faheema explains. “But segregation at source is everything.” If waste is not segregated, there’s nothing they can do downstream.
To change that, Green Worms has partnered with 157 panchayats, offering waste literacy programs, “Garbology” classes in schools, onboarding sessions for employees, and household segregation campaigns. One of their simplest but most powerful teachings is to wash your waste. “Just rinse your milk packet before throwing it. That alone makes a huge difference. And if you can’t clean everything, fine. But try not to dump food and plastic together. That’s the first step,” Faheema explains.
They also created the Green Homes curriculum, which is a basic education module that teaches families how to sort and store waste with dignity and empathy for the workers who will handle it. They work with corporations and conduct community awareness programs at cultural festivals like the Kerala Literature Festival. Their menstrual waste campaign, Swasti, promotes menstrual cups and sustainable hygiene practices in collaboration with women’s groups. “Even our impact reports, the last one was in 2024, have showcased capacity-building programs that give digital literacy and entrepreneurship support to waste workers,” Faheema explains.
What if the solution isn’t tech, but dignity?
For all its innovation, Green Worms’ most powerful idea might be its oldest one: the dignity of labour.
From the beginning, the company has committed to hiring women from underprivileged backgrounds, often from the very communities they work in. Today, over 75% of Green Worms’ workforce is women. They receive fixed salaries, health insurance, skill training, and consistent support, a rarity in India’s informal waste economy, which is largely unregulated, underpaid, and invisible.
“There’s an assumption that waste work is dirty and undignified. But we’ve made it stable, respectable, even aspirational in some places,” Faheema says. And because these women are embedded in the communities they serve, the change they bring is lasting.

Through all these programs, Green Worms has stayed focused on its original insight that India’s waste crisis is not just a material problem but also a mindset problem. And until that changes, Green Worms will keep sorting, educating, shredding, reusing, and rebuilding.
Green Worms Waste Management has built a replicable model of circularity, community ownership, and respect, not just for the environment, but for the people who care for it every day.