About Trashium
Turning everyday waste into something worth keeping
Trashium is an AI-assisted waste management platform that pays households fairly for dry recyclables, picks them up at the door, and rewards the habit of sorting — so material that used to be thrown away gets a second life.
What Trashium is
At its simplest, Trashium is a way to schedule a doorstep pickup of dry recyclables — plastic, paper, cardboard, metals, e-waste — and get paid a fair, transparent rate for them. Underneath that, it is a small circular-economy engine: pricing driven by a machine-learning model, routing handled through neighbourhood micro-hubs, and a gamified rewards layer that keeps households sorting their waste week after week. We treat recycling less like a chore and more like a habit worth building.
The problem we set out to solve
Recyclable material is worth money. Almost no one collects it.
Households throw away dry recyclables because selling small amounts to a kabadiwala isn't worth the hassle.
Scrap rates are opaque — most people have no idea what their plastic, paper or metal is actually worth.
The informal collection network is hard to reach, inconsistent, and rarely shows up on time.
Recyclable material that could re-enter the economy ends up in landfills and drains instead.
Our mission
Make recycling the easy, rewarding choice for ordinary households — by paying fairly, showing up reliably, and being honest about what every kilogram is worth.
Our vision
A West Bengal where dry waste rarely reaches a landfill because a dependable, transparent network makes it easier to recycle than to throw away — and the people who do the collecting earn a steady living from it.
How the platform works
From your doorstep to a recycler, in three steps
Schedule a doorstep pickup
Pick your material and a slot. A verified crew comes to your door — no haggling, no carrying sacks to a scrap shop.
Get a transparent rate
Rates come from a pricing model trained on two years of regional scrap data, not a number made up on the spot. Weight is verified at pickup.
Earn Green Credits
Every kilogram you divert builds Green Credits and moves you up the eco-levels. Credits redeem for rewards and upcycled goods.
The circular economy approach
Waste is only waste when the loop is broken
A bottle thrown in a bin is rubbish. The same bottle, clean and sorted, is raw material. Trashium is built to keep that loop closed — collecting at the source, aggregating through micro-hubs, and passing clean streams to certified recyclers so the material re-enters the economy.
Closing the loop
Clean, sorted material flows to certified recyclers — so a discarded bottle or carton becomes raw input again instead of waste.
Working with collectors
Rather than competing with the informal sector, Trashium gives collectors steady, mapped routes and predictable volumes through micro-hubs.
Built for the belt
Operations are designed around real West Bengal towns — Rishra, Howrah, Shyamnagar, Tarakeswar and Hugli-Chinsura — not a generic metro.
Where the idea came from
A field survey across the Hooghly belt
Trashium didn't start as an app — it started as fieldwork. We spoke with households and local scrap collectors across Rishra, Belur, Bally and Shyamnagar to understand how dry waste actually moves through these neighbourhoods. The same things came up again and again: people didn't know what their scrap was worth, pickups were unreliable, and small quantities simply weren't worth anyone's time.
Those conversations shaped everything — the transparent pricing, the micro-hub routing, and the choice to launch in real towns like Rishra, Howrah, Shyamnagar, Tarakeswar and Hugli-Chinsura rather than a hypothetical city.
An academic project with real-world roots
Trashium is a final-year B.Tech capstone — built by students who wanted their project to address something they could see in their own neighbourhoods. The platform brings together full-stack engineering, a machine-learning pricing pipeline, geospatial route planning, and primary field research. It is a working demonstration rather than a registered commercial service, and we're open about that throughout the site.
Ready to see it in action?
Check what your scrap is worth in your area, or set up your first doorstep pickup.