Mumbai Brand Turns 120,000 Plastic Bottles Into Clothes

When Kapil Bhatia's eight-year-old son came home from online school upset about plastic filling the oceans by 2050, the Mumbai father didn't have a good answer. Two years later, that difficult conversation sparked a business that's turning tons of plastic waste into professional clothing.

Bhatia had spent years in retail through his company Cambridge Textiles when a corporate client made an unusual request in 2019. The customer wanted uniforms made from recycled plastic bottles. Intrigued, Bhatia started researching and discovered that while plastic-to-fabric technology was common in Europe, few Indian companies focused on formal corporate wear.

He launched Unirec in Mumbai in 2021, starting with 500 T-shirts for a bank. The success opened the floodgates. Today, the company produces everything from shirts and jackets to blazers and formal trousers, all from recycled plastic.

The math is remarkable. Each Unirec garment keeps 12 one-liter plastic bottles out of landfills. In just the last six months, the company sold over 10,000 items, preventing 120,000 bottles from polluting oceans and landscapes. That's 2.5 tons of plastic recycled in a single year, while reducing carbon emissions by 40,000 kilograms.

One corporate client gave Bhatia their plastic waste destined for landfills. His team transformed it into fiber and returned 4,000 T-shirts made from the company's own trash.

The Ripple Effect

Bhatia's timing couldn't be better. India generates 3.4 million tonnes of plastic waste yearly, with Maharashtra leading the country's plastic problem. Unirec offers corporations a simple solution: buy the same professional clothing you need anyway, just made sustainably.

The quality surprises skeptics every time. Bhatia's favorite pitch involves showing clients the finished garments first, then asking if they can spot the difference from conventional fabrics. They never can. The recycled clothing lasts just as long as regular garments, though it costs about 20 percent more.

The company now holds Global Recyclable Standard certification, an international verification that tracks recycled content from waste to finished product. With annual revenue reaching $72,000, Unirec proves that environmental solutions and profitable business can walk hand in hand.

Bhatia finally has an answer for his son's question about ocean plastic: some people are doing something, one bottle at a time.