A 25-foot Ganpati idol is probably not where most paper recyclers would look for an experiment in fibre circularity.

But in Mumbai’s Vile Parle, one community has effectively created its own miniature paper-recovery system.

For this year’s Ganeshotsav, the Bal Gopal Mitra Mandal built its 25-foot Mumbaicha Peshwa using tissue paper together with paper pulp recovered from the previous year’s idol.

After immersion, the mandal uses an artificial tank rather than releasing the structure directly into a natural water body. The paper is allowed to break down, the resulting pulp is collected and stored, and part of that material becomes feedstock for the next year’s Ganpati.

The process began much more simply.

Around 2008, sculptor Digambar Mayekar and his sons Sunil and Rajesh began looking for alternatives to plaster-of-Paris idols after seeing the residue left in local water bodies following festival immersions.

They eventually developed structures using tissue paper over bamboo frames.

In 2015, the family produced a 22-foot idol from around 30,000 tissue papers weighing just 150 kg, an experiment reported at the time as dissolving rapidly during immersion.

Over the years, the group experimented with:

tissue paper,

used flowers,

banana fibre,

cocopeat,

vegetables,

and other materials.

But the latest step is more interesting from a pulp-and-paper perspective.

Instead of simply choosing a fibre-based material that disappears more readily after use, the mandal is trying to recover that fibre and use it again.

This is reuse of cellulose, not conventional paper recycling

The process should not be confused with an industrial recovered-paper mill.

There is no MRF.

No recovered-paper bale.

No hydrapulper.

No screening plant.

No cleaning system.

No paper machine.

But the underlying material logic is familiar.

A dried paper structure is exposed to water.

Hydrogen bonds between fibres weaken.

The sheet structure breaks apart.

Cellulose fibres are recovered as pulp.

That pulp is then formed into another structure.

It is essentially the same fundamental property that makes paper recyclable in conventional mills.

What is different is the end product.

Instead of turning recovered fibres into containerboard, tissue or another sheet of paper, the Mayekars use the wet fibre mass as a sculptural material.

That removes some of the quality requirements that normally limit recycled fibre.

A paper machine needs recovered fibres to deliver specific:

strength,

drainage,

formation,

surface quality,

and machine runnability.

An idol does not.

That potentially allows fibres to remain useful even after their papermaking properties have declined.

Fibre does not recycle forever

The closed-loop idea nevertheless has a physical limit.

Cellulose fibres change every time they are wetted, dried and mechanically reprocessed.

Repeated recycling can cause:

fibre shortening,

hornification,

reduced swelling,

and lower bonding potential.

Research into repeated paper recycling shows that fibre performance can decline over successive cycles, although the rate and practical limit depend strongly on fibre type and processing conditions.

That means the Vile Parle group may eventually need fresh tissue or other fibre even if it continues recovering material every year.

And in fact, the process already appears to use a combination of recovered pulp and new tissue rather than claiming that one batch of paper can circulate indefinitely.

That is technically more credible.

Circularity in paper rarely means keeping exactly the same fibres in an endless loop.

It means keeping fibres useful for as many appropriate applications as possible before they finally become too degraded or contaminated for further recovery.

The artificial tank may be as important as the paper itself

The most interesting change may actually be the immersion system.

A paper idol placed into a lake may break down faster than plaster of Paris.

But the fibre, pigments and any other additives still enter the water.

Recovering the material requires control over where that breakdown happens.

By using an artificial tank, the mandal creates a point at which the material can be captured again.

That turns immersion from an end-of-life disposal event into a recovery step.

This is remarkably similar to the challenge faced by commercial packaging.

A material can be technically recyclable.

But if it is dispersed into the environment rather than collected, its recyclability has little practical value.

Collection is what closes the loop.

Paper does not automatically mean zero environmental impact

The story also deserves some caution.

Replacing plaster of Paris with tissue paper does not automatically make every component harmless.

Paints are an obvious example.

Research and government guidance around Ganesh idol immersion has repeatedly raised concerns not only about plaster itself but also about paints and decorative materials entering water bodies. Maharashtra maintains specific environmental guidance for idol immersion, and earlier Pollution Control Board studies examined both plaster and alternative paper-pulp structures.

The Mayekar approach has reportedly used natural gum and increasingly experimented with plant-based materials.

But the environmental performance of any particular idol still depends on the complete formulation:

paper,

binders,

pigments,

decorations,

and anything else added to the structure.

“Made from paper” is not by itself a complete environmental specification.

That is the same lesson the packaging industry is learning with coated paper.

Tissue paper is an interesting choice

Tissue also has useful characteristics for this application.

It is:

light,

highly absorbent,

easy to wet,

easy to layer,

and capable of conforming around a complex frame.

When dried over bamboo, repeated layers can build surprisingly large three-dimensional forms without the mass associated with plaster.

The 2015 example illustrates that advantage particularly well: a 22-foot structure reportedly weighed only around 150 kg despite using tens of thousands of tissue sheets.

But this is a very different use case from conventional tissue products.

Commercial tissue is designed around properties including:

softness,

absorbency,

wet strength,

and disintegration.

For sculpting, softness matters little.

What matters is whether the wet fibre network can be formed, dried and bonded into a sufficiently rigid skin.

The end application changes the value of the fibre.

Banana fibre adds another layer to the experiment

The mandal has also experimented with banana fibre.

In 2022, it reportedly combined banana fibre collected from wedding halls with tissue paper to prevent cracking in a 21-foot structure.

That is another interesting circular-material principle.

Agricultural fibres that might otherwise have limited value can be incorporated into a cellulose-rich structure.

The approach is not directly comparable with industrial non-wood papermaking—where fibre preparation, pulping, cleaning and drainage become much more demanding.

But it demonstrates the same broader idea:

cellulose does not have to begin as conventional wood pulp to become a useful structural material.

Paper mills already investigate similar questions with:

bagasse,

wheat straw,

bamboo,

reed,

and other non-wood fibres.

The engineering requirements are much higher at industrial scale, but the feedstock logic is related.

This is circularity at a very different scale

The project will obviously not change recovered-paper markets.

Its fibre consumption is tiny compared with a paper mill handling hundreds or thousands of tonnes per day.

Its importance is conceptual rather than industrial.

The original approach was:

make an idol from something that creates less persistent residue.

The next step became:

immerse it somewhere controlled.

Now the model is:

recover part of that material and put it back into the following year’s product.

That is a much more complete circular loop.

It follows the same sequence increasingly applied to packaging:

design the material for end of life,

create a collection route,

recover the material,

then find a credible second use.

The biggest lesson is that recyclability needs a recovery system

This is where a neighbourhood Ganpati unexpectedly intersects with industrial paper recycling.

Material selection alone does not create circularity.

Tissue paper has useful end-of-life characteristics because cellulose can disperse in water and be reused.

But that only becomes a loop when someone deliberately collects the resulting pulp.

Without the artificial tank and recovery step, most of that fibre would simply disperse.

The same applies to cartons, cups and packaging.

A package may pass a laboratory repulpability test.

If no one collects it, sorts it and sends it to a mill, the fibre never returns.

In Vile Parle, the recovery system happens to be extremely simple:

a tank,

water,

manual collection,

storage,

and another idol.

But the principle is the same.

The circular part is not the tissue paper.

It is what happens to the tissue paper after the celebration ends.

That is what makes the 2026 Mumbaicha Peshwa more interesting than another alternative-material experiment.

After nearly two decades of replacing plaster with different natural and fibre-based materials, the project has moved from substitution toward actual material recovery.

And for an industry constantly debating what “circular paper” really means, that small distinction is worth noticing.

Last Updated on 18/09/2026 by Jota Machinery