Published 10/22/2025 by Praniti Gulyani
Aarya Borele is a Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley, deeply passionate about sustainability, innovation, and the future of clean energy. She is part of the Biofuels Technology Club at Berkeley, where she spearheads projects converting waste cooking oil into biodiesel, and serves as President of International House’s Resident Council. Now, Aarya is working on her startup: Dhanaj Biofuels in India, that truly attempts to convert “grease into gold.” Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Aarya and learn more about this intriguing initiative, especially the intricacies of what truly goes into the conversion.
Praniti: You’ve transformed Mumbai’s street waste into a sustainable energy model. Was there a single moment or personal encounter with waste or inequality that made you realize biofuel wasn’t just a business opportunity but a moral responsibility?
Aarya: To be honest, it wasn’t one sudden realization, but rather a buildup of everything I’ve seen growing up. My grandfather was a farmer in a tiny village called Dhanaj, and his journey showed me how nothing is wasted: every grain, every drop of water has value. Then I saw the other side in cities like Mumbai, where waste piles up and disappears from sight, but never really goes away. One story, though, has stayed with me. I learned that manual sewage cleaners in India sometimes release cockroaches into manholes before entering. If the insects crawl back out, it means the toxic gases are still breathable. That image changed something in me. I never really thought about who deals with discarded waste, and learning about the dire conditions made me realize that waste isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a human one. The people who deal with what we throw away are often those society refuses to see. So when I started Dhanaj Biofuels, it was never just about building a cleaner energy model; it was about rethinking justice. Turning waste into fuel is my way of saying sustainability cannot exist without dignity.
Praniti: In creating Dhanaj, you tapped into informal sectors — street vendors, waste collectors, grease recyclers. How do you ethically integrate these invisible urban workers into a formal green economy, without displacing or exploiting them?
Aarya: From the very beginning, Dhanaj was built with the belief that sustainability has to be inclusive. You can’t create a green economy by leaving behind the very people who’ve kept our cities running silently for decades: the waste collectors, recyclers, and street vendors who form the backbone of Mumbai’s informal sector. Right now, we work with a network of around fifteen street food vendors, and we’re expanding to twenty-five soon. We also collaborate with housing societies, hotels, and local waste managers to formalize the collection of used cooking oil. A key part of our model is training. We are helping these workers understand how their role fits into a larger clean-energy system and ensuring they earn additional income through it. In the long term, the goal isn’t just to collect waste; it’s to create mobility and opportunity. We’re exploring ways to power rickshaws with biofuel made from the same oil we collect, so the very communities that contribute to the system also benefit from it. To me, that’s what an ethical transition looks like –– a circular economy where no one is left behind.
Praniti: Biofuels often face criticism for scalability. Do you see Dhanaj becoming a decentralized community model (like local micro-refineries) or a national infrastructure player integrated into India’s official energy grid?
Aarya: My biggest critique of biofuels has always been scalability and more importantly, the ethics behind it. Traditional crop-based biofuels often come at a social and environmental cost. Often, for biofuels of this nature, agricultural land is cleared to grow fuel instead of food. Instead of solving the problem, this pushes it off; it feeds into food scarcity and becomes a form of greenwashing. Dhanaj was built to challenge that. Our model uses what would otherwise be discarded (waste cooking oil) and turns it into energy. Rather than being extractive, it is restorative. When I think about scale, I don’t see a massive centralized refinery. I see a network; a decentralized ecosystem of micro-refineries across communities, each tapping into local waste streams and feeding into the grid. I believe that this structure allows for faster, community-specific growth while supporting national energy resilience. Having worked with decentralized energy players like Renewvia and Okra Solar, I’ve seen how powerful local models can be. Dhanaj’s long-term vision is exactly that: to redefine scalability through decentralization; and to make biofuel extend beyond the boundaries of being a mere plant, and transform into a groundbreaking movement.
Praniti: There is a cultural stigma around waste in India — it’s seen as dirty, untouchable. How do you shift the cultural narrative so that young Indians see waste not as refuse, but as raw material for innovation?
Aarya: That stigma runs deep. In India, waste has never just been about hygiene; it’s been about hierarchy. The people who handle our waste have historically been treated as “untouchable,” and this caste based mindset still lingers in subtle ways. At Dhanaj, part of our mission is to reframe waste from something shameful to something valuable. I want young Indians to see what I saw. That innovation doesn’t have to begin in a lab; it can start in an alley, at a food cart, or in the hands of a worker we’ve overlooked. Once we recognize waste as a resource, we begin to recognize people as resources too. I think that that is when sustainability becomes culture, not just policy.