Chennai: Senthil Sankar says his phone has been ringing non-stop since the jacket made out of recycled plastic in his factory at Karur, Tamil Nadu’s textile capital, was donned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament on 8 February.
“We are speechless,” said Senthil (34), managing partner at Shree Renga Polymers and Ecoline Clothing, the firm that manufactured the sustainable blue ‘sadri’ jacket.
The jacket was presented to the PM by the Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) during his 6 February visit to Bengaluru to inaugurate India Energy Week.
Explaining that around 20-28 PET bottles were used to make the jacket, Senthil told ThePrint, “The Modi jacket we made retails at Rs 2,000.”
Sustainable fashion, though increasingly popular in the west, is only slowly catching up in the Indian market, said Senthil.
“We started to work with a lot of corporates, and startups,” he further said, adding that he counts IOCL, Saint-Gobain and Zoho as clients.
Asked what drove him to pursue the entrepreneurial journey that culminated in Ecoline Clothing, he said, “Watching the movie Guru in 2007 was a turning point in my life that is when I decided to hear my calling to be an entrepreneur.”
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Next, uniforms for petrol pump staff
The Karur-based company first presented the concept to Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri last year. “Around three-four months back, we had gifted a waistcoat to minister Hardeep Singh Puri,” said Senthil. He added that the waistcoat “caught the attention of IOCL and the Union minister also liked it and they wanted to present it to PM Modi”.
After getting a nod from the government, Senthil’s team presented nine colour options to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) which opted for Seine blue. The process took three to four months and the finished product was presented to Modi by IOCL chairman S.M. Vaidya during the launch of the “Unbottled” initiative.
Under the initiative, IOCL plans to supply uniforms made from recycled plastic to petrol pump employees across the country.
In 2022, Modi launched the Mission LiFE project, an India-led global mass movement to combat climate change and employ sustainable solutions. While inaugurating India Energy Week last week, the prime minister proposed a “reduce, reuse and recycle” mantra.
Senthil, who has been in the limelight since Modi wore the jacket made by his company in Parliament, said, “The PM has encouraged SMEs like ours to continue our work. This is a very strong statement towards saving the environment, towards climate change, towards the commitment we have towards, net zero objectives of the government.”
Making polyester fibre ‘capital-intensive’
Senthil’s father K. Sankar (65), an IITian who had a dream of coming up with innovative, tech-savvy solutions to recycle polymer products, founded Shree Renga Polymers in 2008. The firm started off by recycling PET bottles — a process which involves crushing, washing and grinding the bottle and is known as PET flakes hot washing.
Over the last 15 years, Sankar slowly but steadily expanded his business by manufacturing polyester fibre, which Senthil described as a process that involves multiple “capital-intensive steps”. The firm first made the shift from recycling PET bottles into flakes to making polyester fibre in 2014.
“Polyester fibre is made from heating and passing flakes through a spinneret. This is further spun to produce yarn and then knitted into polyester fabric, a process we started in 2018 and in 2021, we launched Ecoline Clothing which is focused on producing sustainable clothing solutions,” said Senthil, whose company now employs around 400 people.
A mechanical engineering graduate from the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Senthil worked with a corporate company before joining his father’s business in 2010-11.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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