The Indian slum putting a billion-dollar industry to shame

Spread across about 550 acres, the cramped lanes and makeshift homes of Dharavi house about a million people – giving the impression of a crowded, chaotic space with no future. But a closer look reveals a self-sustained recycling industry that inhales and filters 80 per cent of Mumbai’s waste. 

Mega-cities like Mumbai produce staggering amounts of trash – about 6,500 tonnes of plastic waste is produced daily, left unmanaged and unsegregated, waiting to be picked up. 

Delhi generates around 11,000 tonnes of solid waste daily and Bangalore about 990 tonnes.  Both Delhi and Bangalore have informal recyclers — waste pickers, scrap dealers, small units — but they exist in more dispersed pockets without the cohesion and ecosystem that Dharavi provides. What sets Dharavi apart is its densely packed, centrally located, self-organised network that processes a significant portion of Mumbai’s waste.

The process starts in the hands of waste workers who collect and gather plastic waste from all over Mumbai each morning, from streets and landfills to commercial spaces and households. This waste is then transported to small recycling units in Dharavi, where it is sorted by plastic type and crushed into flakes. 

Once crushed, the plastic enters an often invisible supply chain of middlemen, local sellers and collectors until finally arriving in larger recycling facilities that resell it to manufacturers that turn it into products. 

Behind Dharavi’s recycling hub

Dharavi’s transformation into an informal recycling hub can be traced back to its origins as a sparsely populated swamp in the 1800s. With the growth of Bombay, Dharavi became the dumping site for the waste produced by industries. With Mumbai’s rapid expansion, business centres were established around Dharavi, making its central location a logistical advantage. The recycling sector’s survival is fueled by low cost warehouses and flexible space. 

Dharavi proved to be a natural fit: The densely populated area surrounding it provided an abundant supply of cheap labor and its informal housing structure provided inexpensive space for operations. At first glance, this grey industry seems to work well. But under the surface, it is a risky, murky place to work – and hard to regulate.

In a city full of inequality, waste picking became one of the the only jobs needing no credentials, contacts, licences or networks. 

“The background of an average waste collector is someone who jumped into a train without a ticket. The first who came to Mumbai as waste collectors came just to survive,” said Vinod Shetty, head of social services NGO ACORN Foundation Mumbai, which works with female waste pickers. 

Shetty explains how in the West, conveyor belts and weight sensors are used to sort recyclables. But Dharavi’s workers are able to sort 12 to 20 types of plastic – outperforming formal systems used abroad. “We are better recyclers than the West not because we care more, but because we are poorer. We need this job. And this job exists because society keeps making a mess,” said Shetty.

Shetty added, “This is a dirty business – like blood diamonds. You don’t want to know where they come from. People want to wear diamonds to a wedding, but if you knew where they came from, you wouldn’t wear them. Same with plastic – if that story of the waste collector were told, the labour and conditions, the user may not want it .”

The Human Cost of Recycling

The health implications for waste pickers are severe. Workers sort mixed and untreated waste with their bare hands, risking cuts, septic wounds infections as well as prolonged exposure to toxic fumes and pollutants which can lead to respiratory diseases such as asthma, tuberculosis and throat infections. The continued exposure to waste also threatens to contaminate their food and drinking water sources.  

“Every person, child, woman, and man who works handles toxic waste,” said Shetty. “It has bacteria, glass, and all kinds of dangers.” While child labour in Dharavi’s recycling units has dropped due to more stringent child labor laws in the past decade, many children - most of whom are not in school -  continue working as ragpickers, off the books and invisible to the system. 

ACORN focuses on female waste pickers, who are faced with layered problems. These women usually work very early in the morning before going home to their domestic responsibilities. 

One such woman is Anjali, who shared her experience with FairPlanet, said: “My day starts at 4am, and after long hours of waste picking, I also need to manage all the household chores.It’s been four years since I’ve been doing this work as a waste picker.

“I studied until grade 10 in my village in Satara, but after some of my family members fell ill, I had to move to Mumbai. Out of compulsion, I started waste picking.” 

Like many others, Anjali has suffered injuries from handling hazardous materials, saying, “I’ve encountered health issues, mostly bruises on my hands and legs due to picking waste in dangerous areas.” 

She adds that being a woman in this line of work is particularly challenging: Due to the stigma surrounding their work and clothing, they ride in goods compartments rather than on the passenger trains to commute. They do not have toilets or crèches at the work sites, and are often forced to take unpaid leaves for pregnancy and child care. 

Anjali told FairPlanet, “I make anything from INR 100 to INR 400 (USD 1.17 to 4.68) per day, depending on the amount of waste collected.” This adds up to roughly INR 3,000 to 12,000 per month (about USD 36 to 145). In comparison, the minimum monthly wage in Maharashtra for unskilled workers ranges from INR 11,000 to 13,000 (approximately USD 132 to 157). 

Rima Basu, the Programme Manager at ACORN highlighted the harsh realities that women working in this sector face daily – where the gender ratio of men to women skews 1:4. Women waste pickers face sexual harassment, caste-based discrimination and domestic exploitation. 

Many waste pickers are illiterate, lack access to banking services and are often vulnerable to financial scams. Women, in particular, risk being physically assaulted or falsely accused of theft if caught collecting waste in public. Basu notes that “Women in this sector work longer than 14 hours a day, with no protections or measures to mitigate working conditions, and are stuck between public humiliation and social exploitation.”

An Invisible but Vital Industry

Another issue is that the plastic industry avoids taking responsibility for the waste it generates. As long as informal workers carry the burden, companies see no need to change. Shetty explains that the fix is simple: “If plastic manufacturers, the corporations who gain from it, set up formal systems – where poor workers could earn an honest living by sorting waste – it would change lives.”

In each major Indian city, tens of thousands do this work. The plastic industry, meanwhile, is worth billions. As Shetty said, “If they added two paisa to each plastic item, all 200,000 people could be given decent jobs, homes, and schooling for their kids. You could build a special economic zone in Mumbai just for them.”

The Supreme Court of India has said that the polluter must pay. If a company produces single-use plastic, it should pay to recycle it – and that includes workers’ welfare, and creating clean, safe places for recycling. There are regulations such as extended producer responsibility (EPR) and a ban on plastics, but enforcement has been weak. 

A strong recommendation by Basu is to add a cess under the Solid Waste Management Rules that would be paid by manufacturers and consumers to be given to the recycling projects and workers welfare. “However, to implement this type of recommendation, political will is required and coordination is required from many ministries involved in the drafting of and delivering of the long overdue charge to those polluting,” she told FairPlanet.

“And if the buyer wants that product, like a phone – if someone pays 50,000 rupees for an iPhone – the cost of recycling that plastic and metal must be in that 50,000. So why are there informal systems? Why do people not have food to eat? Because the industry won’t take responsibility for recycling,” said Shetty.

“People think what we do is useless and has no value, but I believe our work makes a big difference in keeping the city cleaner,” says Anjali.

Image by Hardik Joshi.