Originally reported and written in July 2022, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.

Kanika Ahuja, founder of Lifaffa, recalls visiting a landfill as a young child. “I wanted to climb what I assumed was a small hillock. I saw many other children from the area play there. However, I was forbidden from doing that. I was told that I would either hurt myself or get sick if I played there,” she tells The Better India.

Recalling the vivid imagery of the mounting garbage in the landfill, Kanika also remembers growing up in a household that was extremely conscious of how much and what they consumed. “Trying to find ways to move towards a circular economy became something I consciously started working towards,” she says.

In 1998, Kanika’s parents, Anita and Shalabh Ahuja established Conserve India, an NGO focused on energy efficiency. They eventually started working on ways to tackle the plastic menace that Delhi was and is still grappling with. While her parents were neck-deep in running this NGO, they were not keen on having Kanika join this line of work.

“My father, particularly, didn't want me to join this line of work. So, I studied engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka, and then went on to do an MBA from SRCC, Delhi. By 2015 I had joined a market research firm. It was during my stint at that firm that I wanted to make a switch and be a part of the development sector,” she says.

That was how in 2016 she joined the NGO her parents had founded. “There came a point where the work that Conserve India was doing felt like only being that of an export house and that was when we took a break and decided to reassess that work that we were doing,” she adds.

This break led to the birth of Lifaffa in 2017, a brand that designs and markets upcycled plastic products in India, the USA and Europe.

Today, close to 12 tonnes of discarded plastic is being upcycled into wallets, bags, laptop sleeves, table mats, etc, annually, which mitigates the plastics from ending up in........

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