We all know how plastic impacts the environment. Used in everything from lunchboxes to heavy machinery, the process of plastic adoption was very quick with little thought given to its recycling.

In the last decade, there has been a major shift in the attitudes around the world about the importance of recycling, reusing, and reducing plastic usage. Lucro is a company that has successfully built a solution advancing towards this goal.

In early 2012, Ujwal Desai and his co-founders realized that due to the lack of awareness and proper infrastructure, the products sold by many automotive manufacturers were improperly disposed of despite being completely recyclable. This led to the creation of Lucro, a plastic waste management company who created a recycling process that bought back the products after usage at a predefined price. These plastic scraps were then recycled to make plastic bags.

By solving a problem facing the automotive industry, Lucro started getting attention from other manufacturers. As they scaled, communicating with people with limited reading and writing capabilities was a challenge. This is where the WhatsApp Business app helped.

"Sharing of information is so seamless, and that has really helped us"

“We have been using WhatsApp from the early days,” explains Ujwal. “It was an easy medium for communication with everyone in the value chain - from ragpickers, scrap dealers, scrap aggregator, and others. And it has helped us a lot. We have grown so much year on year, and major credit goes to the WhatsApp Business app. Sharing of information is so seamless, and that has really helped us. I can easily say all our buying and selling of scrap is done through WhatsApp Business.”