Waste-management startup Recykal is drawing attention for two connected reasons: its $23 million, or roughly Rs. 218 crore, bridge funding round and its public association with cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar.

What Recykal does

Hyderabad-based Recykal was founded in 2016. The company credits Abhay Deshpande as Founder and CEO, with Abhishek Deshpande, Anirudha Jalan, Ekta Narain, Sujan Parthasaradhi, and Vikram Prabhakar as co-founders.

Recykal uses a digital platform to connect waste generators, collectors, aggregators, recyclers, brands, and compliance teams. Its aim is to make India’s recycling chain more organized, traceable, and commercially viable.

For example, a consumer-goods company that sells packaged products has a responsibility to ensure that a portion of the packaging is collected and recycled. This responsibility is known as Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR. Recykal helps brands track waste collection and recycling activity while working with recyclers and informal waste-sector participants.

The platform covers areas including plastic waste, e-waste, batteries, tyres, lubricating oil, paper, and other recyclable materials.

How the $23 million bridge round works

A bridge round is funding raised between major investment rounds. It helps a company continue building, hiring, launching products, or expanding operations before a larger future fundraising round.

Recykal’s $23 million bridge round included both primary and secondary capital. Primary capital is fresh money invested into the company for its operations. Secondary capital is used when an existing shareholder sells shares to another investor.

Reports say Rs. 9 million of the round came from new investors, including Biological E and family offices connected with its Managing Director Mahima Datla, as well as Dr. Nageshwar Reddy and PVS Raju of AIG Hospitals. Existing investors, including 360 ONE, Trinity Combinator, Strat Ventures, and Ajay Parekh’s family office, contributed the remaining amount. Early investor Circulate Capital exited through the transaction.

Where Recykal plans to use the money

The startup says the new capital will support technology investments, wider deployment of its Deposit Refund System, behavioural-change programmes, and international expansion.

A Deposit Refund System, or DRS, works by adding a small refundable amount to a packaged product. When the consumer returns the empty packaging to an approved collection point, the deposit is returned. The model is designed to encourage people not to throw bottles and cans into general waste reported VCCircle.

Imagine buying a drink with a small extra deposit. If the empty bottle is returned through a collection machine or partner point, that amount comes back to the buyer. The packaging can then move into a more reliable recycling stream.

This approach could improve the collection of clean, sorted waste. It may also create more predictable supply for recyclers and make waste pickers’ work more visible within the formal system.

What Sachin Tendulkar’s association could add

A famous name cannot solve a waste problem alone, but it can bring public attention to a habit that is often ignored. Recykal’s stated mission is to drive responsible waste-management behaviour among one billion people.

Tendulkar’s association may help the company reach households, young consumers, brands, and local communities through awareness campaigns. But readers should separate this public-support role from a confirmed financial investment, which has not been disclosed in the available public information.

Competition and the road ahead

Recykal operates in a competitive circular-economy market. Its peers include EPR and collection-focused businesses such as Karo Sambhav and GEM Enviro, while companies such as Attero focus more strongly on e-waste and battery recycling.

Recykal’s advantage will depend on its ability to build trust across brands, recyclers, consumers, and waste workers. Technology can track material movement, but the real test is whether more waste is collected, sorted, and recycled at scale.

Image

Every photo stored in the cloud, online payment, video call, AI prompt, streaming show, and mobile app depends on physical machines somewhere. Those machines sit inside data centers.

A data center is often described as “the cloud,” but there is nothing weightless about it. It needs land, buildings, power lines, backup systems, cooling equipment, water in some designs, and thousands of pieces of hardware. As demand for AI, digital payments, e-commerce, and connected vehicles rises, data centers are becoming an important part of modern infrastructure. They are also raising serious questions about electricity, water, and emissions.

What is a data center and why is it built

A data center is a secure facility that stores, processes, and sends digital information. It may support a bank’s mobile app, a hospital’s records, an automobile company’s connected-car platform, or an AI service.

Companies build or rent data-center space to keep services available around the clock. The facility protects equipment from outages, overheating, cyber risks, fire, and physical damage. It also helps businesses handle large numbers of users without their website or app slowing down.

Cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud compete to offer this computing capacity. Telecom firms, banks, startups, government departments, and large manufacturers also operate their own facilities or lease space from specialist operators.

The main parts inside a data center

The servers do the actual computing. They run websites, databases, apps, AI models, and business software. Storage systems keep files, videos, backups, and customer records. Networking equipment, including switches and routers, moves data between servers and out to users.

But the equipment around the servers is just as important. A data center needs uninterrupted power supply systems, batteries, transformers, backup generators, cables, fire-suppression systems, security controls, and cooling equipment.

Land matters because a large campus needs room for the building, power substation, diesel generators, cooling systems, water infrastructure, access roads, and future expansion. Reliable electricity is usually the first deciding factor when choosing a location.

Cooling is essential because servers release heat continuously. Depending on the design, a facility may use air cooling, chilled water, cooling towers, outside air, or direct liquid cooling. Water use can be low in an air-cooled site and much higher in a facility using evaporative cooling towers.

A 1 MW data center – the basic calculation

To keep the example clear, assume the data center has a 1 MW IT load. In simple terms, its servers, storage, and networking equipment use 1 MW of electricity.

Now assume a Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, of 1.50. PUE measures total facility energy divided by IT-equipment energy. A PUE of 1.50 means that for every 1 kWh used by computers, another 0.5 kWh is used by cooling, power conversion, lighting, and other building systems.

The global average PUE reported by Uptime Institute was 1.56 in 2024, while newer large facilities can do better than older sites as per Uptime Institute.

With a PUE of 1.50, the 1 MW IT load becomes a 1.5 MW total facility load.

If electricity costs Rs. 8 per kWh, the energy bill alone works out to roughly:

This does not include land, construction, generators, equipment replacement, employees, network connectivity, taxes, water treatment, or maintenance.

How many servers can 1 MW support

There is no fixed answer because a basic business server may use a few hundred watts, while a powerful AI server can use several kilowatts or more.

For a simple illustration, if each compute server uses an average of 2 kW, 1 MW could power about 500 servers if all IT capacity went to those servers. In reality, some power must also go to storage and networking, so the actual number could be lower.

If those 500 servers each had two 64-core processors, the facility could contain around 64,000 physical CPU cores. That is not the same as a fixed level of performance. AI workloads depend heavily on GPUs and accelerators, while website hosting may depend more on memory, storage speed, and network capacity.

The US Department of Energy notes that server power varies widely, from mainstream systems to mid-range and high-end machines using roughly 2 kW and 12 kW respectively.

Water use and carbon emissions

Water use depends heavily on local weather and cooling technology. Using a planning estimate of 1.8 litres per kWh of total facility energy, a 1 MW IT data center with a 1.50 PUE could use about 23.65 million litres of water annually at the site. This is an estimate, not a universal figure. An air-cooled facility may use much less on-site water, while a cooling-tower design in a hot climate may use more as per US Department of Energy.

For carbon, assume the Indian grid factor of 0.716 kg CO2 per kWh, based on the Central Electricity Authority’s FY 2022-23 figure that includes renewable energy. The 1 MW example would produce about 9,408 tonnes of CO2 annually from electricity use, unless the operator matches or replaces grid power with cleaner energy.

What changes at 10 MW, 50 MW, and 100 MW

The same formula scales quickly. The table below assumes the same 1.50 PUE, Rs. 8 per kWh electricity cost, 1.8 litres per kWh water estimate, and 0.716 kg CO2 per kWh grid factor.

Larger data centers may achieve better PUE because they can invest in efficient cooling and power systems. Still, better efficiency does not automatically mean lower total consumption. A huge, efficient facility can use more electricity overall than a smaller, less efficient one.

Are data centers a threat to the environment

They can be, especially when rapid construction depends on coal-heavy electricity, scarce water, or poorly planned land use.

Electricity is the biggest concern. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers used around 415 TWh globally in 2024, or about 1.5 percent of worldwide electricity demand. If that electricity comes from fossil fuels, emissions rise.

Water is another local issue. A data center may be manageable in a water-rich area but controversial in a drought-prone district. The choice between water-saving cooling and energy-saving cooling can involve difficult trade-offs.

Land use also matters. A large campus can replace open land, affect drainage, add noise from generators and cooling equipment, and disturb nearby biodiversity if site selection is weak. Then there is electronic waste. Servers, batteries, networking equipment, and cooling parts must be repaired, reused, refurbished, or recycled responsibly instead of being discarded early.

Local power supply can become strained when several large facilities seek grid connections in the same area. This can require new substations, transmission lines, and generation capacity.

Why data centers still matter

Data centers support digital payments, emergency services, research, cloud software, online education, connected vehicles, manufacturing systems, and startups that cannot afford to build their own IT infrastructure. The answer is not to stop building them. It is to build and operate them more carefully.

Renewable power purchase agreements, on-site solar where practical, wind power, battery storage, waste-heat reuse, efficient chips, server virtualization, better software, and direct liquid cooling can reduce the impact. Operators can also use reclaimed water, select water-stable locations, extend hardware life, and publish clear data on electricity, water, and emissions.

Key takeaways

Data centers are essential digital infrastructure, but they are resource-intensive physical facilities.

A 1 MW IT data center operating at a PUE of 1.50 uses about 13.14 GWh of electricity each year. At Rs. 8 per kWh, that is roughly Rs. 10.51 crore in annual electricity cost.

As capacity rises from 1 MW to 100 MW, electricity use, water demand, operating costs, and emissions grow enormously. Efficient design helps, but clean electricity, responsible water planning, durable hardware, and transparent reporting matter just as much.

Disclaimer

The calculations in this article are illustrative estimates based on stated assumptions for PUE, electricity tariffs, grid emission factors, and water use. Actual data-center costs, power consumption, water needs, server capacity, and carbon emissions can vary by location, climate, hardware, cooling design, workload, electricity source, and local regulations. Readers should obtain site-specific technical, financial, and environmental assessments before making business, investment, or infrastructure decisions.