Paperman
Spirit of Recycling
The Paperman app, founder Mathew Jose, connects trained scrap dealers to thousands of households.
Mathew is helping the recycling industry in India meet its supply gap by creating a new system of emotional rewards and intrinsic incentives that get citizens and children to separate and aggregate waste.
As India’s population grows, so does the amount of trash it produces, and greater the challenge of dealing with waste. This is the problem that the Chennai-based social enterprise Paperman was created to address.
Mathew grew up in a family of entrepreneurs in the plywood business and was expected to join the family business. However, while studying some of India’s most successful businesses such as the Tata and Birla Corporations during his graduation, he noticed how these businesses were either exploiting people at the bottom of the pyramid or the environment. Disillusioned with conventional business, Mathew decided against business school. Instead he explored the social enterprise sector that sought to achieve triple bottom line impact. To learn more about the social entrepreneurial space, Mathew started working with Ashoka fellow, M. Nirmal, in his waste management organization, ExNora.
During his work at ExNora, Mathew also got the opportunity to closely observe the daily routine of a kabadiwallah. He saw how the local paperman quietly goes about his job and makes a measurable impact in the society on a daily basis, by recycling 4 tonnes of waste every month. Mathew travelled around the city finding and profiling kabadiwallahs, calculating the carbon credits they had earned over their lifetime of work and publicly recognizing them as local heroes on his blog.
Seeing opportunity in working with them to build a culture of recycling, Mathew decided to start his own organization, Paperman, in 2010 at the age of 22 years, to get people excited about waste management by showing them a measurable impact of recycling their waste in a new way.
“With rising urbanization and global consumption patterns, waste management is a critical sector that needs a bold vision and innovation,” says Mathew Jose, Paperman’s founder and chief executive officer. “Since 2010, Paperman has been continuously innovating to improve the waste management ecosystem in South India.”
