Shillong’s Recycle Bazzar App Launch Targets 50 Green Jobs

Shillong-based waste management startup Recycle Bazzar will launch its mobile application on July 1 on both Android and iOS, with founder Rony Saha targeting more than 50 green jobs for local youth as neighbourhood waste captains, per Recycle Bazzar’s July 1 launch announcement. The app is the public face of a model that turns informal scrap collection into scheduled, app-based pickups run by trained local workers the company calls Titans. The launch, announced this week, comes from a venture that runs an active Titan workforce across 14 Shillong localities.

The app, the Titan training programme, and the workforce target together reframe waste collection as formal employment rather than informal labour. The next six days will tell whether the model travels beyond the 14 Shillong localities the company already covers.

Recycle Bazzar at a Glance

• App launch: July 1 (Android and iOS)
• Green jobs targeted: more than 50
• Active Titans today: 11
• Shillong localities covered: 14
• Rate positioning: 10-20% above market, per the company site
• Northeast recognition: named among six outstanding sustainability startups at the Prakriti Incubation Launchpad

The App Behind the Model

The Recycle Bazzar app lets households, offices, and businesses in Shillong schedule a scrap pickup at a time that suits them. A trained Titan arrives at the chosen slot, sorts and weighs the material on site, and the app records the evaluation and the transaction in real time. That trail gives households and businesses visibility into what happens to their recyclables after the truck pulls away, the company says.

The collected material is routed to verified scrap centres and recycling facilities rather than to informal dumping. The digital trail, from scheduled pickup to final recycling partner, distinguishes Recycle Bazzar from the itinerant scrap buyers who handle most of the city’s recyclables today, per the Green Directory profile of the recycling platform. By making pickups schedulable and tracked, the platform replaces the on-again, off-again rhythm of the informal trade with a service a household can plan around and a worker can plan a workday around. The app’s role is narrow but deliberate, more a scheduling and record layer than a consumer product in its own right.

What the app does not do is collect the material itself. That work falls to the Titans, the local workforce the company is now planning to grow from the current 11 to more than 50 by the time the new round of hiring is done.

Fifty Green Jobs, One Neighbourhood at a Time

Saha’s plan, announced alongside the July 1 app launch, is to grow the company’s active Titans from 11 today to a workforce of more than 50 across Shillong. The new hires are described as Titans in the company’s own materials and as Recycle Captains in the public announcement; both names appear on the company site and in the launch press note. The job is not a standard collection role. Recycle Captains are also branded as Waste Relationship Managers, a title that signals customer-facing work rather than weighbridge labour. Each Titan’s day involves visiting households, weighing and sorting scrap on the kerb, paying the customer in cash or through the app, and routing the material onward through the platform’s network.

The recruitment pitch is direct: stable work, on-the-job training, and a formal income in a sector where most workers handle the same material without a contract, an ID, or a schedule. The startup is appealing to residents to book pickups through the new app and to young people across Shillong to apply for the Titan roles. The public number is the workforce target; the timing of the hires is not spelled out beyond the July 1 launch as the starting line.

What Training a Titan Actually Involves

Every Recycle Captain goes through a short, structured programme before going on the road, and the four-part curriculum is the clearest window into what the company thinks a Titan’s job actually is. The list is short on detail by design, and the modules are split between customer-facing skills and on-ground collection work.

1. Customer relationship management
2. Communication
3. Technology use
4. On-ground waste collection practices

The split is unusual for a scrap collection role, where most workers handle the material without any standard interaction with the seller. The technology module, by extension, is the app: how to log a pickup, how to record weights, how to handle the digital receipt. The on-ground module covers how to sort waste at the doorstep, how to evaluate different categories, and how to handle the materials Recycle Bazzar accepts, including e-waste, paper and cardboard, hard and regular plastic, metal scrap, and vehicle scrap.

The startup is hiring, training, and deploying in parallel, with the same workers doing the collection that the new app is built to schedule. The four-part curriculum doubles as the company’s view of the gap it is trying to close: the informal sector treats collection as a cash trade, and the training treats it as a service job with a standard interaction layer. That shift is what the green jobs are buying.

From Eleven Captains to Fourteen Localities

Recycle Bazzar already has 11 active Titans, per the company’s Green Directory profile, and operates across 14 named Shillong localities per the launch announcement. The two figures tell different parts of the same story: a small workforce covering a wide patch of the state capital, room to grow in both directions. The 14 localities are also a recruitment shortlist. The company says the workforce target is a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood expansion, with the existing 14 patches as the seed map for the next phase. Rural expansion, the announcement adds, is a longer-term plan that will follow once the urban footprint is stable.

The full roster of active localities, as listed in the launch announcement, runs through a wide spread of Shillong’s residential and commercial map. Each patch will need its own Titan or two to cover the scheduled pickup volume once the rollout is complete. The list is also a practical reading of where the company is winning, because 14 named areas in a city of Shillong’s size is a foothold, not a sweep. The new hiring is being framed as a deepening of the same map, with the same Titan model, before any move into new districts.

• Laitkor
• Laitumkhrah
• Lumawbah
• Madanrting
• Nongrah
• Lumshyiap
• Chandmari
• Jaiaw
• Chapel Road
• Pynthorbah
• Laimer
• Lummarboh Block 2
• Mawlai
• Mawpat

Rony Saha’s Path and PRIME Meghalaya’s Role

Saha is the founder and the public face of the company, which trades as Saha Recycle Bazzar Private Limited. The company’s own scrap collection services in Shillong frame the venture as a clean-tech employer with a national ambition: to become Bharat’s leading waste management solution, a stated goal, with a near-term focus on Shillong.

The bootstrapped early phase has had public-sector help. Saha credited the PRIME Meghalaya programme with mentoring the startup and helping it tighten its business model before the app launch and the Titan expansion. PRIME, run through the Meghalaya Institute of Entrepreneurship, is a Government of Meghalaya entrepreneurship initiative launched in 2019, and it runs startup hubs in Shillong and Tura. The programme’s pitch to founders is incubation, mentorship, training, funding, and networking, the same kind of support a hardware or software startup might expect, repurposed here for a doorstep collection business.

For Recycle Bazzar, the visible result of that backing is a launch date, a public app, and a hiring number that puts the workforce growth on a single page. The partnership is also a reminder that the formal-sector push into Shillong’s waste economy is being shaped, in part, by state-level entrepreneurship policy. The Titan training curriculum, the digital trail through the app, and the workforce target are the company’s answers to a question PRIME asks of every cohort: what does scale look like for a venture that is rooted in a single city?

A Northeast Recognition and a Rural Push

Earlier in the year, Recycle Bazzar was recognised among six outstanding sustainability startups from Northeast India through the Prakriti Incubation Launchpad programme, a separate endorsement to the PRIME mentorship. The recognition matters because it gives the company a regional frame, Northeast India, at a moment when the Shillong operations are still small; the 14-locality map and the 11-Titan workforce are the local frame, and the Prakriti citation is the regional one.

The near-term plan is Shillong. The longer plan is rural Meghalaya. Saha has said the company intends to expand its operations outside the state capital once the urban footprint is stable, a sequence the company frames as proof-of-concept in the city, to be followed by a rollout across the rest of the state. The workforce target is the bridge between the two phases: enough to staff the current 14 neighbourhoods, to add capacity in the new ones, and to begin scoping the rural move. The app is the surface, the Titans are the workforce, and the rural expansion is the next test of whether the model survives outside a state capital.

Our vision has always been to create sustainable livelihoods while solving the waste management challenges faced by our communities.

Rony Saha, founder of Recycle Bazzar, in the announcement of the July 1 app launch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Recycle Bazzar app do?

The Recycle Bazzar app is the public booking layer for the company’s door-to-door pickup service in Shillong. Households, offices, and businesses use it to schedule a slot, a Titan arrives to sort and weigh the material on site, and the app logs the transaction. The pickup then routes to verified scrap centres and recycling facilities rather than to informal dumping, a step the company distinguishes from the itinerant buyers who handle most of the city’s recyclables.

Who can become a Titan?

The startup is recruiting Shillong-based youth for the Titan role, with on-the-job training in customer relationship management, communication, the app itself, and on-ground waste collection. The role is the company’s interpretation of a familiar collection job as a customer-facing service position. New hires go through the structured programme before going on the road.

Where does Recycle Bazzar currently operate?

The company has 11 active Titans covering 14 Shillong localities, including Laitkor, Laitumkhrah, Lumawbah, Madanrting, Nongrah, Lumshyiap, Chandmari, Jaiaw, Chapel Road, Pynthorbah, Laimer, Lummarboh Block 2, Mawlai, and Mawpat. Operations are concentrated in Shillong; rural expansion is planned.

How can residents sign up for a pickup?

The Recycle Bazzar app goes live on July 1 as the 50-Titan expansion gets underway, on Android and iOS. Until then, residents can contact the company through its website, recyclebazzar.com. The site positions the service as a pay-for-scrap model, with rates set 10-20% above the informal market.