Recycling in India: Impoverished but improvising

Customary waste recycling, as the developed world understands it, isn’t a chore or civic duty in India -- it’s a livelihood. In Mumbai, there are no local government initiatives requiring residents to recycle their waste via colorful supplied bins for plastics and papers. That's a long way off. So it's up to the city’s enterprising residents to fill the void.
Through a complex web of self-appointed sorters, recyclers, sellers and various middlemen, almost everything in the metropolis -- from empty beer bottles to old magazines to worn-out barbecue grills -- eventually finds its way back into circulation. Here's how.

The Sorter     

Amar sorts it out.

It all starts here, in the courtyards of Mumbai’s countless apartment blocks. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai often subcontracts garbage collection to locals like the man who identifies himself as 'Amar,' a plump Mumbaiker with gold chains and a genial smile.

He coordinates the sorting of rubbish at the Bandra home of a blogger named Clement, who chronicles life in the northern enclave at Bandra Buggers.

Every morning Amar’s men sort through the trash, extracting bottles, papers, magazines, plastics and household items. Pretty much everything has a resale value, though Amar explains that certain trash is worth more than others.

“No one’s too interested in plastic, as it only fetches two rupees per kilo,” he says. “Whereas paper gets you three times amount; and newspaper is heavy. Beer bottles are worth two rupees each,” he says.

The Middleman

Once the sorting is complete, Amar departs for his other job, as the middleman linking residents and officials from the Bombay Municipal Corporation or BMC, the erstwhile name of the government organization still used to refer to the authorities in charge of running the city.

After the rubbish is sifted at each apartment block, it's transported in large hessian sacks to roadside stalls where it's again sorted and bundled for resale.

Hemant Patel’s stall on a Bandra footpath takes everything, from paper to old cables and empty whisky bottles. Once a week, a truck from a recycling factory in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, comes to collect the paper.

Hemant makes only a small profit from the paper. He sells it for six rupees and fifty paise a kilo (US$0.14), but the volume makes it worth his while.

Any old books or magazines that turn up are sent to shops such as Prince Bookseller and Paper Mart at the nearby Pali Hill market, where used local and foreign magazines hang from pegs around the door and old books line every inch of wall space.

“Pali Hill is home to a lot of rich expats who subscribe to foreign magazines, so everyone wants to be the first to sort through their garbage,” says Clement. A magazine that sells for 600 rupees new can still fetch half that secondhand. So even a used copy of Vogue is considered gold to a recycler.

The Recycle Don

The shop’s owner, Vinod, began as a street-stall recycler like Hemant. He now works from a prestigious address and reports earnings upwards of 20,000 rupees per month.

“Tax-free,” adds a grinning staff member.

One shelf of Vinod’s shop is stacked with empty foreign liquor bottles -- again, often collected from the trash of wealthy Pali Hill residents. There is very high demand for empties, says Vinod -- but only if they're imported. “The more expensive the liquor, the more expensive the bottle,” he says. A Johnnie Walker Black Label bottle will bring him 100 rupees. The bottles are filled with generic liquor and sold.

Who would buy fake liquor? Someone preparing a gift for a local official.

“The officials rarely know the difference,” one of Amar's bottle recyclers says with a chuckle.

At sunset Amar’s men are finished with work and he climbs on his motorbike to head home. In a city with almost 20 million people crammed onto one island, the principle lesson of recycling in India is reaffirmed on a daily basis -- when everyone must squeeze a buck out of thin air, even garbage pays. And sometimes pays pretty well.