India’s festive season is often marked by color, fragrance, and flowers. From marigold garlands at temples to roses and jasmine used in offerings, flowers are an integral part of many celebrations and rituals.

But once the prayers are over and the festivities wind down, large quantities of these flowers are left behind. For a handful of Indian entrepreneurs, that has raised a simple question: can something that has already been part of an important ritual be given a useful second life?

Over the years, startups and small enterprises across the country have begun collecting floral waste and turning it into incense, compost, soaps, decorative products and even newer biomaterials. Here are four such ventures looking at flowers not as something to discard, but as a resource that can be reworked.

In Kanpur, the idea behind Phool began with a sight that stayed with founder Ankit Agarwal: flowers from temples making their way into the Ganga. Agarwal, along with Prateek Kumar, eventually founded Phool in 2017, building on an idea he had begun exploring a couple of years earlier.

The startup collects discarded temple flowers and processes them into products including incense sticks, incense cones and other wellness products. Its research has also led to Fleather, a biomaterial developed from flower waste as an alternative to animal leather.

What started as an attempt to address flower waste has therefore grown into a larger........

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