Mumbai Startup Turns Plastic Waste Into Paint Chemicals

Every can of paint you open and every tube of glue you squeeze contains specialty chemicals most people never think about, and nearly all of them still come from virgin fossil fuels. Tulon Materials, a Mumbai startup founded in 2022, is working to change that by turning plastic waste into those same high-performance ingredients.

The company was founded by three chemists with nearly 80 years of combined industry experience: Asesh Sarkar, Dr. Rabindranath Mandal, and CEO Harsh Bhatt. Their technology converts complex plastic waste, the kind that typically can't be recycled through normal processes, into chemical resins that meet the strict performance standards required for industrial paints, coatings, printing inks, and adhesives.

This isn't about making lower-quality substitutes. Tulon is engineering recycled plastic into specialty inputs that can actually compete with conventional materials in applications where quality matters most.

The startup recently raised Rs 10 crore (about $1.2 million) in seed funding led by investor Karthik Sundar Iyer, with participation from Valour Capital partners and angel investor Agam Shah. That money will go toward speeding up engineering work and getting products to market faster.

To compress development timelines that normally take years in traditional specialty chemicals, Tulon uses AI across its research workflows and runs an open innovation platform. They work directly with industry partners, research institutions, and customers to validate products quickly instead of doing everything behind closed doors.

The company is also aiming high geographically. Tulon is positioning its products for the European Union, which has some of the world's strictest materials regulations alongside growing demand for lower-carbon industrial inputs. Multiple products are already undergoing technical validation with large multinational companies, though Tulon hasn't named them publicly yet.

The Ripple Effect

Most sustainability conversations in India focus on visible consumer categories like packaging, fashion, and food. Tulon is working in a much less glamorous space: the industrial raw material layer that sits invisibly underneath products people use every day.

If the company succeeds, consumers will likely never notice the switch happened at all. That can of paint will look the same, work the same, and cost roughly the same. But its chemistry could trace back to plastic waste instead of virgin fossil feedstock, a quiet transformation happening at industrial scale.

The real impact isn't in any single product. It's in proving that waste plastic can become something valuable enough to replace fossil-derived chemicals in demanding applications, creating economic incentive for the transformation to spread.

This is how real change often happens: not through dramatic announcements, but through invisible improvements that slowly remake entire supply chains.