TurtleTales

Most things you throw away are not actually waste. They are materials you have not figured out a use for yet.

Rice husk is the best example of this that anyone in India has daily access to. It is the hard outer shell that separates from a grain of paddy when it is milled into rice. India produces about twenty-two million tonnes of it every year. For most of that twenty-two million tonnes, the journey from rice mill to landfill or open fire is short, quiet, and unremarkable. The husk piles up behind the mill. Eventually somebody sets it alight to clear space. Nobody writes about it. The carbon goes up.

And yet — and this is the part that takes a moment to absorb — rice husk is one of the more interesting natural materials available to anyone working in material design. It contains about twenty percent silica. That means it is naturally hard. It resists fungus. It is chemically stable in the temperature ranges your tea and your coffee will ever reach. It does not warp under normal conditions. These are properties you would normally expect from an engineered material, not from the by-product of milling paddy.

So what do you do with that?

You combine it with a food-grade binder and a small amount of compatibilizer — the agent that bonds the two ingredients at the molecular level — and you inject the blend into a mould at around 200 degrees Celsius. Out comes a mug. Or a chai cup. Or a set of cutlery. The rice husk content varies between thirty and forty-five percent depending on the specific product being made. The rest is the binder and the compatibilizer. The whole thing is food-grade certified, IS 10910 compliant, FDA-tested, and BPA-free.

The mug that comes out of that process does not feel like what uninformed social media tells you to be afraid of. It is not the PVC that leaches. It is not the polystyrene that breaks down badly. It is not the polycarbonate with the BPA concern. Those are specific materials with specific problems that have been correctly identified as problematic — and then incorrectly generalised into a belief that anything with a binder material is dangerous. The food-grade binder in a HuskMade cup is the same class of material used in medical packaging, baby bottles, and food storage containers that have been in safe daily use for decades. The leaching concern is real. It just does not apply here.

The carbon math is the part we find most honest to lead with. A 200ml bio-composite mug carries a cradle-to-gate footprint of roughly 0.26 to 0.30 kg of CO₂-equivalent. An equivalent ceramic mug from a coal-fired kiln in Morbi runs closer to 0.85 kg CO₂-equivalent. The difference comes almost entirely from manufacturing temperature — 200 degrees versus 1,200 to 1,400 degrees. Six times lower process energy is where sixty-five percent of the carbon saving comes from.

And then the end-of-life question, which we want to answer completely.

The mug is recyclable. Grind it, remould it, use the material again. Internal testing by our manufacturing partner confirms properties hold for approximately five recycling cycles. The recycled material finds its second life in non-food-contact applications — furniture, automotive parts, construction materials — because current FSSAI regulation has not yet cleared recycled bio-composite binder for food contact. Only recycled PET has that clearance in India right now. So the mug does not come back as another mug. It comes back as something else useful. That is still a circular economy. It is just not the seamlessly closed loop the best future version of this story will eventually have.

The mug is not biodegradable in a landfill. Recyclable and biodegradable are different end-of-life pathways and conflating them is one of the most common errors in sustainability communication. We want to be precise about this because imprecision here is what greenwashing is made of.

What we are most confident saying is this. The enemy of the environment is not any particular material. It is the linear economy — take a resource, use it once, throw it away. A kulhad used once is as linear as a paper cup used once. A bio-composite mug used five thousand times, then recycled into a furniture component, is circular regardless of what its binder is made from. The UNEP has said this directly: it is the single-use nature of products that is most problematic for the planet, more so than the material they are made from.

We started TurtleTales because we could not stop thinking about the husk pile behind the rice mill. We are still thinking about it. The material is good. The story it tells about agricultural waste, about manufacturing temperature, about what a mug can become over its lifetime — that story is honest and it is ours.

And the husk that would have burned behind a mill in Karnataka is, in some small but growing percentage of cases, holding someone's morning chai in Bengaluru instead.

Sandeep — the product manager we shadowed — leaves his apartment in HSR Layout at 6:45 AM with a black bag, a laptop, and a HuskMade chai cup tucked in the side pocket. He says it took him three weeks to remember to carry it. Now it is automatic. Like keys.

The cup makes its first appearance at 7 AM, at a chai stall on 17th Cross. The vendor — Murali, who has been there for nine years — sees Sandeep coming and reaches for his pour without looking. They have a routine. The chai goes into Sandeep's cup, not into a paper one. Fifteen rupees. Sandeep has saved Murali about eighty paise in cup cost. Multiplied across the regulars Murali has trained, that adds up.

Cup goes back in the bag.

8:30 AM, Cubbon Park entrance after a walk with friends. Tender coconut. The vendor offers a plastic glass for the water that does not fit in the shell. Sandeep holds out his cup. Some confusion. Then a laugh. The water goes in. No glass.

10:30 AM, his office in Embassy Tech Village. The vending machine is the kind everyone in Bangalore tech offices knows — quiet hum, paper cups stacked tall on the side, button for filter, button for masala. Sandeep removes the paper cup the machine has automatically dispensed, places his own under the spout, presses filter. Coffee comes out into his cup. The paper cup he removed gets put back on the stack for the next person. He has trained the office assistant on this trick. It works most days.

1 PM, post-lunch. The canteen is one of the older ones, still pours filter coffee from steel pots into davaras. No swap needed for sit-down. For takeaway, his cup. The cook nods. He has been making this cup work for eight months.

4 PM, a meeting. Tray of paper cups arrives. Sandeep takes the chai from his cup-mate's tray, pours it into his own, returns the empty cup to the office assistant before it ever holds tea. The assistant, Pankaj, has stopped including a cup in Sandeep's count when ordering. Twelve cups in the meeting, not thirteen.

7 PM. The hard one. He is on a late call with a US client and orders Swiggy chai because the office canteen has shut. It arrives in a paper cup with a plastic lid. He cannot avoid the disposable here — the platform requires a sealed cup. What he can avoid is sitting with it for the next two hours. He decants into his cup, throws the disposable, gets back on the call.

9 PM, home. His mother makes filter coffee for him. He pours it into his cup, partly out of habit, partly because she has seen him use it for a year now and he does not want to break the cycle. She tells him it tastes the same. He says yes, but the carbon footprint is different. She says I do not know what that means but the coffee is good. They drink in their separate cups.

Seven uses. One cup. About fourteen disposable cups not generated, on a single day.

The thing Sandeep says, when we ask about it, is that none of this was effortless. The cup is heavier than the bag wants. He forgets it sometimes — usually on Mondays. Vendors used to look at him strangely. Some still do.

What changed, he says, is that the swaps stopped being decisions. They became the architecture of his day. The cup is what holds his coffee now, the way the laptop is what holds his work and the bag is what holds his laptop. He stopped thinking about the swap and started just having the cup.

That, in his words, is the part nobody tells you. The first month is awkward. The second is automatic. The third is invisible. By the fourth, you are making an actual difference and you are not even noticing it anymore.

A friend asked me last week which sustainable cup she should buy. I told her she was asking the wrong question.

Every reusable cup on the market draws on Earth's limited resources somewhere. The clay for the kullhad. The silica for the glass. The iron ore for the stainless steel. The agricultural fibre and food-grade binder for the bio-composite. None of these is free, none of these is infinite, and pretending otherwise is the overclaiming that has damaged every previous wave of sustainable materials. The real question is not which is best. It is which draws least per unit of utility delivered, in your actual life.

There are nine reasonable categories of alternative to the single-use plastic cup. None of them is perfect. Here is what I have learned from actually living with most of them.

The ceramic mug is where most people start. It feels permanent. It is not. In a shared office pantry, ceramic mugs break at about twenty percent a year. Tile floors. Industrial dishwashers. The intern who dropped two in the same week. We call this the Fragility Tax — the carbon cost of every replacement cycle, paid again and again because the original cup did not survive normal use. Ceramic also breaks dangerously, and the sharp shards end up in mixed waste streams where India's roughly four million informal waste workers sort our garbage by hand. Broken ceramic and glass are among the top causes of hand injuries for these workers. When you choose a fragile material, you are quietly transferring an injury cost to a person you will never meet. Ceramic works at home on your own desk. It fails everywhere else.

Glass has the most beautiful end-of-life story — fully and infinitely recyclable in Indian municipal systems. It also has the worst breakage profile. Same ragpicker injury concern, in some ways more sharply. I keep one glass at home for tea. The day it breaks, I buy another. That is the deal.

Stainless steel is the workhorse. It does not break. It will probably outlive me. The trade-off is upfront carbon from steel production and the heat problem — steel gets too hot to hold for hot drinks unless it is double-walled. Best for travel, gym, water.

Agri-fibre bio-composite is where things get interesting. The category covers a few different feedstocks — rice husk, coffee husk, wheat straw, processed bamboo fibre — all of which are plant cellulose, all of which behave structurally as filler in a food-grade binder, all of which deliver similar properties at the end of the manufacturing line. The cup we make at TurtleTales uses rice husk specifically because it is the most abundant agricultural waste in India and contains the silica that gives the fibre its natural strength. Other manufacturers use other plant fibres — the material science is the same, the feedstock story is what differs.

Either way, the result is a cup that contains between thirty and forty-five percent agricultural fibre fused with a food-grade binder. It does not break when you drop it. It survives dishwashers. It does not feel like the plastics that actually have leaching concerns — those are PVC, polystyrene, and polycarbonate, not food-grade bio-composite binders. The carbon footprint is approximately sixty-five percent lower than ceramic because the manufacturing temperature is six times lower.

The end-of-life story is honest and still being built. The material is mechanically recyclable — grind it, remould it, use it again in a non-food-contact application. Properties hold for approximately five cycles per internal testing. The recycled material becomes furniture or automotive parts, not another mug — current Indian regulation has not yet cleared recycled bio-composite binder for food contact. That is circular but not perfectly closed. We are working toward the closed version. Best for offices, cafés, and anywhere ceramic would break.

Pure bamboo is the romantic option. Genuinely earth-to-earth at end of life. Also cracks within twelve months. To extend its life, most manufacturers apply lacquers or thermoset resins — which solves the durability and ruins the end-of-life story simultaneously. The honest pure bamboo cup is short-lived. The long-lived bamboo cup usually is not what it claims. Important to distinguish this from bamboo fibre bio-composite, which is processed bamboo fibre acting as filler in a food-grade binder — that falls under the agri-fibre bio-composite category above, not this row.

Copper is perfect for water. Not for tea or coffee — copper reacts with acidity. My grandmother had one. I have one. Use it for what it is good at.

Edible cups are the fun category. You eat the cup. No waste by definition. Fifteen-minute life before sogginess, ten-times-cost. Use them for events, not daily life.

Compostable PLA and bagasse cups say biodegradable on the side. They are, in industrial composting facilities. India does not have these at scale. In a landfill they persist like conventional single-use. They are honest only with an actual composting partner. Most offices do not have one.

The kullhad is the original Indian answer. Clay cup, returns to clay. Ecologically excellent, practically limited, culturally important. Use them at chai stalls. They are not an office solution at current scale.

So when my friend asked which one to buy, I told her it depends. For home: glass or ceramic. For office pantry: agri-fibre bio-composite. For travel: steel. For special events: edible. For chai at the station: kullhad. For making this lifestyle actually work: the commitment to carry whichever cup you own, into the day, and use it.

No perfect circular material exists at the current state of materials science. Honest work is always picking the better next move.

A rice mill in Karnataka has a pile of husk behind it. Most days, that pile catches fire.

Nobody plans it. Sometimes a worker sets it deliberately to clear space. Sometimes it self-ignites under monsoon heat. Either way, the smoke rises, the carbon goes up, and the cycle repeats with the next harvest. India runs on rice. India also burns the leftovers from rice. About 22 million tonnes of husk every year, most of it lit somewhere, by someone, for nothing.

We do not talk about this burn. We talk about the other one. Stubble burning. The paddy straw farmers in Punjab torch every October, the one that turns Delhi's sky beige and pushes air quality past 400. That fire has news cameras. The husk fire does not. It just happens, quietly, behind every rice mill in the country, all year long.

We started TurtleTales because we could not stop thinking about the husk pile.

Rice husk is the hard outer shell that comes off when paddy is milled into rice. It is tough, fibrous, chemically resistant, and almost completely useless to most buyers. Cement plants take a little. Power plants take some. The rest sits in piles. Eventually, it burns.

What if you could turn it into something useful instead? Something that lasted years instead of seconds? Something that displaced a different problem while it was at it — the disposable paper cup, used once for a chai, dumped in a landfill that never breaks it down?

That question became HuskMade. Forty percent rice husk fibre, fused with food-grade polypropylene, injection-moulded into mugs that do not break, do not stain, and do not feel like plastic. Each mug uses about 23 grams of husk. Each mug replaces hundreds of disposable cups across its lifetime. Each mug carries a 65% lower carbon footprint than the ceramic mug it replaces, because we mould at 200°C instead of firing kilns at 1,200°C.

The math is real. The story is what keeps us going.

Climate change in India is often discussed in boardroom language. Scope 3 emissions. Net-zero. Carbon credits bought from forests in places we will never visit. Those conversations matter. But they sit on top of a much older Indian story — the one about agricultural waste, rural economies, what we burn and what we save. Most of us grew up around piles of crop residue being burned. We learned to ignore the smoke.

HuskMade is our small vote for a different version of that story. The husk does not burn. It becomes a chai cup. The chai cup sits on someone's desk in Bengaluru, or at a kulhad-style café in Pondicherry, or in a corporate pantry replacing thousands of disposable cups a month. Every cup carries a Carbon Karma footprint reading. Your climate impact, made visible. A small number that makes a small choice feel real.

We are not solving stubble burning. That is a different fight, with different farmers, different timing, different politics. But we are part of the larger answer to the same crisis. Building commercial value for agricultural waste, so that burning becomes the inferior option. The more of us who do this — material innovators, biochar makers, bio-energy plants, husk-based startups — the faster the economics tilt away from fire.

If you have read this far and want to be part of that tilt, pick up a HuskMade mug. Use it daily. Tell someone about the husk pile.

The conversation matters more than you think.

Every Friday evening in some glass-fronted office tower in Bengaluru, somebody ties up a plastic bag full of used paper cups and carries it to a basement dumpster. They do not count the cups. Their employer does not count the cups. The building's waste contractor does not count the cups. The bag goes downstairs. The week ends. The cups disappear into a system that nobody really thinks about.

We started counting last year, almost by accident.

Two cups per employee per working day. A 2,000-person company. Two hundred working days a year. The arithmetic landed at roughly eight lakh cups. About four tonnes of paper-and-plastic that left the building one bag at a time, with nobody recording it leaving.

The financial number was the second surprise. The cups themselves cost the company about eight lakh rupees a year. Lids and sleeves added another two and a half lakhs. The waste-collection contract had a quiet uplift of about a lakh and a half, because the volumes are real even when nobody is naming them. The total — twelve lakhs a year — was hiding in plain sight, fragmented across three different cost centres, owned by no single budget.

That was the spreadsheet truth. The other truth was harder to sit with.

Most paper cups in Indian offices have a thin polyethylene lining inside. You cannot see it. You cannot peel it off. You cannot recycle it. Less than one percent of used paper cups in India ever re-enter a recycling stream, because the lining cannot be separated from the paper and the food contamination disqualifies what remains. The label on the side that says "recyclable" is correct at the factory and meaningless at the bin.

For ten years, the disposable paper cup has been the Indian office's quietest contradiction. We replaced flimsy plastic with paper because paper sounded better. Then we stopped checking.

And then, sometime in late 2025, the regulatory air changed. India's top one thousand listed companies began preparing for a new reporting requirement — value-chain emissions, supplier-level disclosures, audit-ready carbon data on every line item that crossed two percent of procurement spend. Office consumables, which had sat unexamined in pantry budgets for years, suddenly had to be counted, named, and explained. Procurement teams began to look at the trash bag differently.

The first instinct was ceramic. Heavy, premium, recyclable, comforting. But ceramic in shared pantries breaks at about twenty percent a year. Tile floors. Industrial dishwashers. Careless interns. The savings disappeared into replacement orders. And the carbon footprint of a ceramic mug fired in coal-heavy kilns and trucked across the country turned out, in many cases, to be higher than the disposable problem it was supposed to solve.

The second instinct took longer to find. Drinkware made from rice husk — the agricultural by-product that would otherwise have been burned at rice mills — was lighter than ceramic, harder to break, dishwasher-safe, and carried roughly a 65 percent lower carbon footprint per cup. Each unit could ship with an emissions sheet that satisfied the new reporting questions. The technology was Indian. The husk was Indian. The supply chain ran inside the country.

We are not telling anyone to switch tomorrow.

We are saying: count first. Open the pantry contract. Add the lid line. Add the waste-contract uplift. Add the storage cost. The number you find is almost certainly larger than what finance has internalised. The carbon number is almost certainly larger than what sustainability has filed.

And once you have both numbers in your hand, the conversation about what to replace the cups with becomes simple. Not easy. Simple.

The cup, it turns out, is no longer too small to count.