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When trying to be sustainable, Indians grapple with a lack of availability and unaffordability of products. And if that’s not enough, most of the products in the market are greenwashed due to poor certification standards.
Building on an insight that if eco-friendly products can attain price-parity with plastic and tree-based ones, their sustainability model will be unstoppable, Arvind Ganesan and Rahul Singh founded EcoSoul Home in 2020.
In an interview, Rahul Singh tells us about his journey in sustainability, loopholes consumers should be aware of when buying products labelled eco-friendly and his suggestion to policymakers in India.
Edited excerpts…
How did the idea of EcoSoul Home come about?
My co-founder, Arvind, and I worked at Wayfair, a USD 40 billion e-commerce company. At Wayfair, we wanted to build a sustainable category and studied the sustainability market. We figured that it is one of the largest categories in the world in consumer products after F&B.
When you look at single-use plates, bowls, cutlery or napkins, they’re either made of plastic or another wood-based product. The world needed a company to provide credible products and create a transition to tree-free and non-plastic products.
No consumer really wants to use plastic products, but the reason we do it is because it is affordable and widely available. I figured that if we could achieve price parity with plastic products, there wouldn’t be a reason for anyone to continue using plastic. With that vision, we started the company and today, we are present in over 11 countries. We sell in the US, the UK, Europe, GCC and India.
How does your company work on integrating sustainability into the back-end?
Firstly, our factories are located where the raw materials are. Through that, we minimise the impact of the transportation of raw materials. Next, we procure our agro waste directly from the source - that is, farmers and sugar mills. Our products are made from bagasse or wheat straw and rice straw. In India, we mostly burn such agro-waste, so we also minimise the impact of the burning of those raw materials. We are also making a transition to clean power in our factories, and currently, about 20% of our energy comes from solar panels.
Apart from our focus on environmental sustainability, we also think about our contribution to the communities we operate. Some of our factories are 100% women-led, and all of them have a minimum of 50% women employment. Most of the people we provide jobs to were once migrant workers and today, they get to be employed in their hometowns, which is another one of our goals.
What are some loopholes consumers should be aware of when buying a product labelled eco-friendly?
Greenwashing of products is probably the greatest challenge we face in our industry. Nowadays, anything is called biodegradable. For example, one of the largest platforms in India is selling plastics in the name of oxo-biodegradable. This is just a chemical additive in plastics that helps it degrade faster, but it is not eco-friendly. It is also banned in Europe and America.
At EcoSoul, we are constantly trying to bring more awareness to our platforms, retailers and distributors. From a consumer perspective, when buying a product that claims to be eco-friendly, check to see if there is an agency that certifies it as eco-friendly.
In India, the CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board) does it, however, they do not have a framework to do an eco-friendly certification for all products. Also, look for international certifications like TUV Austria, BPI (Biodegradable Products Institute) and Seedling. Every product that we sell in India comes with international certifications, and it is the same product that is sold in all the other countries in which we are available.
Is there an incentivisation for such eco-friendly products?
No, there is no incentive whatsoever. While the government is incentivising the EV industry through tax incentives, in India, environment-friendly products or plastic alternatives are taxed at exactly the same rate as plastic products.
While we know there’s a single-use plastic ban in India, how effectively it is enforced is questionable. The other aspect is that once you use an eco-friendly product made from agro waste, it disintegrates into the soil, becoming fertiliser. On the other hand, plastic will stay there for another 500 years, and it doesn’t become fertiliser, it becomes microplastics.
Meanwhile, we are only taxing plastic for sales and not for waste management. When you have a product like ours that has a negligible waste management cost, it would be smart to incentivise it.
What does your current consumer base look like, and what is the best way to reach out to them?
Almost 50 to 55% of our products are ordered by women - in both Eastern and Western markets. This is because a lot of household decisions are made by women. Our core cohort of consumers is women between 35 and 45.
We see higher adoption among young mothers. As soon as you become a mother, you realise that there is a generation after us, and begin to care for them.
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The single best source of marketing and raising awareness is through influencer marketing. We work with over 350 mom influencers in India. And worldwide, it goes up to 5,000. They help us take our product to the right cohorts.
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