When food waste is unavoidable what do you do? You get innovative! That’s what Golden Feathers has done with chicken waste. The innovative green venture converts chicken feathers, extracted from chicken waste, into a ‘wool-like’ fibre and handmade paper.
“Thousands of tonnes of chicken waste get piled up in landfills or thrown into water bodies leading to pollution and health hazards. Only a small portion is used as fish feed. From one kg of chicken, the waste amounts to 350 gm. Imagine the amount of waste that gets generated in the country,” says the founder of Golden Feathers, Radhesh Agrahari.
“On an average, there are 70 gms of feather in a chicken. Since 2019, we have reclaimed over one lakh kilogram of feathers preventing them from adding to land and water pollution. In the last three years, Golden Feathers has upcycled more than 600 tonnes of chicken waste into handloom cloth (wool) and handmade paper,” he says.
Registered as Mudita & Rajesh Pvt Ltd in 2019, the social enterprise has a second major objective – to create employment for tribal women. It has skilled and provided a livelihood to over 10,000 tribal women so far.
GIAN (Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network), Ahmedabad, founded by Prof Anil Gupta, helped the venture by providing networking opportunities, says Radhesh. Golden Feathers features in the book ‘People’s Festival of Innovations – 2023’. The festival was jointly organised by GIAN and C-CAMP (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms).
The initial investment in the venture was Rs 50 lakh. The venture started with a revenue of Rs 65 lakh. This dropped to Rs 15 lakh during the lockdown. The annual revenue figure for 2023-24 is Rs 1.12 crore.
Golden Feathers has received just one grant from the French embassy of Rs 25 lakh in 2023. Other than that, the venture is self-sustaining, says Radhesh. He has two partners, Abhishek Verma and Muskan Sainik. “Our target is to use at least 10 tonnes of chicken feathers a day so that our women get sufficient employment,” says Radhesh.
Classroom Project
Radhesh comes from a traditional nine-member family in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, headed by a matriarch, a loving grandmother. After completing his schooling in UP, he studied fashion and textile design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Mohali. He did his post-graduation from Indian Institute of Craft and Design, Jaipur. He did part-time jobs to complete his education.
How did he come up with this innovative idea of using chicken waste? “The inspiration to start the venture came from a classroom project while I was doing postgraduation. It was a design thinking project which had to be applied to a current Indian problem. I selected the topic of food waste, specifically chicken waste. I researched the topic for nine years before I launched Golden Feathers,” he says.
Around 5,000 ragpickers have been employed and trained by the company to collect chicken waste from local butchers. This waste goes through 27 processes of meticulous sanitisation to ensure hygiene. No harmful chemicals are used in the treatment processes. It is then sorted and the feathers are extracted from the waste. The sanitisation and processing unit is in Pune. Radhesh has designed special semi-automatic (to ensure that employment is not affected) machines for the various processes.
Patented Processes
Chicken Waste. Pic: Golden Feathers
“Wet waste (chicken waste) spoils in six hours. We are collecting, sanitising and making it into useful products. Golden Feathers holds exclusive Patent and IP Protection for the innovative processing and production of feather wool pulp and yarn. Our sanitisation processes are also patented. The value of the patent is Rs 500 crore,” explains Radhesh.
Tribal women segregate the feathers, ensuring quality, and they are made into pulp and then yarn. Charkhas (spinning wheels) are used to spin the yarn from the reclaimed feather wool. This yarn is woven on the looms.
The chicken feather woollen fibre obtained is soft, warm and durable having insulation properties and tensile strength. “Craft lovers and environmentally aware people appreciate the products. It does not matter to them that the products come from chicken waste. After all even sheep wool is made from the hair of sheep. We make fibre from reclaimed feathers on chicken. I call the fibre that we have created the ‘sixth natural fibre’ after cotton, silk, wool, jute, hemp,” he says.
Zero wastage
High-quality wool is made into running woollen cloth, and elegant shawls, stoles and mufflers. The feathers which are not good for spinning are used to make handmade paper or converted into fillers for quilts, pillows, mattresses and sleeping bags.
To minimise waste even further, the byproduct of the feather treatment process gets converted into a compost which is distributed among local farmers as an excellent biofertilizer. This step makes it very close to a zero-waste venture. Two other eco-friendly practices of this green venture are use of recycled paper for packaging and use of natural dyes, wherever possible.
The venture has won several awards. When it was just launched, it won the CII Design Excellence Award in 2019 for ‘design for social impact and sustainability’. It won the Aegis Graham Bell Award for innovation in clean technology in 2020. In 2020-21, it bagged the prestigious German Design Award for ‘excellent product design – lifestyle & fashion’ category.
Golden Feathers was the Swachhata Startup Challenge winner in 2022. It won the National Bio Entrepreneurship Competition in 2022. It also won the National Conference Social Innovation (Tribal Category) award. The venture won the Tata Social Enterprise 2022-23 award in association with IIM Calcutta. It also won the Eureka 2023 award with E-Cell, IIT Bombay.
Future plans are focused on expansion in the paper segment. Golden Feathers plans to set up a paper mill and enter the paper making and packaging industries in a bigger way. “Today, to make one kg of paper you need 3 kg of wood. We want to make wood-free paper from chicken feathers. This is another green, sustainable product we want to expand in,” he adds.
This is an abridged version of an article by Aruna Raghuram published on ‘30 Stades’ website in May 2024. The link of the original article is given below:
