The big-picture brother who connected waste to the air

Vihaan Agarwal connected Delhi’s waste to its air after the Ghazipur landfill collapse, co-founded One Step Greener at 14, and jointly won the Children’s Climate Prize 2019 and the International Children’s Peace Prize 2021 with his brother Nav.

By The Young Achievers2 min readSources checked 23 October 2026

Vihaan Agarwal · Aged 14 at the founding (2018), 15 at the Climate Prize (2019) and 17 at the Peace Prize (2021)

Filed under: Environment & Service · Delhi · Environmental action (One Step Greener)

Share · Print · Save for later

The link between waste and air

Vihaan Agarwal was 14 when the Ghazipur landfill collapse of 2017 showed him the link between Delhi’s waste and its poisoned air. Living with asthma that often kept him indoors, he decided his own family’s waste would not feed the landfill fires.

In 2018 he co-founded One Step Greener with his younger brother Nav, coming up with the idea of organised dry-waste pick-ups that grew from 15 homes into a city-wide service. “I am more of a big picture person,” he told KidsRights, describing how the brothers divided the work.

From 15 homes to a city

At 15, in November 2019, Vihaan jointly won the Clean Air category of the Children’s Climate Prize in Sweden with Nav. On 13 November 2021, aged 17, the brothers jointly won the International Children’s Peace Prize, presented by Kailash Satyarthi in The Hague; by then One Step Greener was collecting from more than 1,500 homes, schools and offices.

✳ A spark to explore

Vihaan later took the work with him to university: a Stanford profile in April 2024 reported the organisation serving 25,000 households, with about 600,000 kilograms of waste recycled and more than 40,000 trees planted — the organisation’s own figures, reported with their date; later publicity claims were not verified at an organising body and are not used. Vihaan’s asthma made pollution personal for him — is there a problem in your own neighbourhood that affects you directly enough to act on? That is a question from us, not part of his record.