Every morning, in thousands of schools across India, children sit on bare cement floors — legs crossed, backs hunched, notebooks balanced on their laps.

While on the flip side, the furniture we take for granted is made utilising approximately eight to thirteen million cubic meters of wood annually for furniture manufacturing. This demand is projected to rise to about 13.34 million cubic meters by 2030, reflecting the industry’s growth trajectory.

All the while, outside these classrooms, landfills overflow. Plastic bags tumble in the wind, discarded wrappers choke drains, and heaps of mixed waste grow higher each day — unsorted, unrecycled, untouched. It’s easy to miss the connection. But what if these two problems — broken learning spaces and broken waste systems — could solve each other?

The founder of ‘unWOOD’ found the answer to it.

unWOOD a vision with a bold central idea: to turn the plastic no one wants into the furniture everyone needs. By transforming unrecyclable waste into strong, wood-like material, unWOOD isn’t just tackling pollution, it is reshaping how we build, sit, and learn.

Vishal Mehta, mechanical engineer and co-founder of unWOOD, says, “In the quest to meet the growing furniture demand, we forget how many trees are cut to make that single chair or table that you usually use. At a time when we’re talking about restoring biodiversity, tackling climate change, and protecting our forests.”

A problem even sustainability couldn’t solve

Before founding unWOOD, Vishal spent over 17 years in the infrastructure and renewable energy space. Ironically, while building facilities meant to save the planet, he saw another crisis unfolding.

“Even when you’re building a sustainable power plant, you bring in a lot of materials, and you generate a lot of waste,” he says. “Plastic waste, especially the flexible, low-value kind, was a huge challenge. No one recycles it. It just gets discarded.”

It’s the kind of plastic that wraps your chips, biscuits, groceries, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits, and delivery boxes — too dirty, too mixed, too complicated to recycle.

“I was frustrated,” Vishal admits. “Here I was, trying to follow sustainability standards, but this one problem felt impossible to fix.”

Then, in a moment of serendipity, he met Dr Babu Padmanabhan, an engineer, inventor, and materials scientist who had quietly been working on........

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