A city’s recyclables should not be sold blind
Madras Waste Exchange puts what a resource recovery point holds in front of every buyer at once — quantity, material, location and pick-up window — and lets the bids decide the price.
This site is an independent restoration of the exchange’s public pages. Accounts, bidding and orders are not live here.
- 9material categories traded
- 24 hcancellation cut-off before pick-up
- 2sides — sellers list, buyers bid
Illustration: an example listing screen showing open bids on four materials.
Our idea
Segregated waste has a buyer. What it usually lacks is a place where the buyer and the holder can see each other.
A resource recovery point fills up with sorted material and then sells it to whichever dealer turns up that week. The dealer knows the market rate; the recovery point does not. The result is a price set by whoever happened to be standing there.
The exchange turns that around. A recovery point lists what it holds, buyers across the city see the listing at the same moment, and the seller picks from the bids that come back. The material moves faster, the money is better, and less of it ends up in a landfill because nobody came to collect it.
The same mechanism scales past one city: any local body running recovery points can list on it, and buyers gain a wider catchment without driving further.
Materials traded
Nine categories, each listed by weight and held at a named recovery point.
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Plastic bottles
PET bottles collected from households, offices and events.
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Shredded plastic
Post-consumer plastic already washed and shredded to flake.
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Multi level plastic
Laminated multi-layer packaging — the hardest fraction to place.
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HDP waste
High-density polyethylene: crates, drums, caps and rigid containers.
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Glass bottles
Sorted by colour where the buyer asks for it.
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Tube / LED lights
Handled separately — mercury-bearing tubes need a licensed recycler.
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Coconut shells
Feedstock for activated carbon and shell charcoal.
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Coco pit
Coir pith, baled or loose, for horticulture and soil conditioning.
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Vermi compost
Produced at decentralised composting points from wet waste.
How it works
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Register as buyer or seller
One account per organisation. A recovery point, a bulk waste generator, a scrap dealer or a recycler each register once.
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List or browse materials
Sellers publish what they hold and how much. Buyers search by material, quantity and distance.
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Place a bid
Bids carry a price and a pick-up window. Sellers see every open bid on their listing side by side.
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Confirm and collect
Once a bid is accepted it becomes an order with a fixed pick-up date. The seller keeps the quantity updated until collection.
Orders are not accepted for cancellation inside 24 hours of the pick-up time — after that the order stands.
On the platform
Live inventory
Every recovery point keeps its own stock figures current, with the time of the last update shown next to the quantity.
Open bidding
All bids on a listing are visible to the seller at once, so the material goes to whoever actually values it most.
Order rules that hold
An order cannot be cancelled inside 24 hours of the pick-up time — after that it stands, so pick-up rounds can be planned.
Map-based search
Buyers can pin a location or allow the browser to place them, then sort recovery points by how far away they are.
Acts and rules
The framework a municipal solid waste exchange operates inside.
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Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016
The central rules that make segregation at source mandatory and place duties on waste generators, local bodies and processors alike.
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Extended producer responsibility
Obligations on brand owners and producers for the packaging they put on the market — the reason a steady, documented supply of sorted plastic has value.
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Standing orders and contracts
Local bodies contract collection, transport and processing separately. An exchange sits alongside those contracts rather than replacing them.
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Hazardous fractions
Tube lights, batteries and e-waste move under their own rules and go only to authorised handlers, never into the general recyclable stream.
Questions people ask
Who can sell on the exchange?
Recovery and collection points, resident associations, bulk waste generators, and anyone else who accumulates segregated recyclable material in usable quantity.
Who buys?
Scrap dealers, aggregators, processors and recyclers who need a steady, sorted feedstock rather than mixed loads.
Is there a minimum quantity?
It is set per material and per seller. Small quantities are usually pooled at a recovery point before they are listed.
How is the price set?
By the bids. The exchange does not publish a fixed rate — the seller decides which of the open bids to accept.
What happens to material nobody bids on?
It stays listed. Multi-layer plastic and mixed glass are the fractions that most often sit without a bid; those are the ones a city has to solve for.
We are here to assist you
Questions about listing material, or about buying it, go to the address below.