Mumbai’s rubbish

I seem to remember that security businesses regularly warn people in England that they should be aware what they throw into their rubbish – because someone somewhere is probably sifting through it, looking for ‘sensitive’ information.
But here in Mumbai, that warning is superfluous. It is a simple fact of life that, every day, someone is searching, by hand, through my rubbish - I can see him or her doing it from my window. And so it is with the waste of every resident of the city.

Mumbai is a city of recycling. As soon as I throw a plastic carrier bag, some spoiled tin-foil, or an old newspaper, or even a used battery into the kitchen bin, the housekeeper will retrieve it. Usually, she tuts at me, annoyed that valuable material is being wantonly discarded, and asks me not to repeat my thoughtlessness.
Early on in our relationship, the housekeeper also made it clear that one of the perks of her job was that she got first dibs on other discarded things – from old combs to greying shirts. So now, she keeps various plastic bags in her cupboard; and into each she sieves the various unwanted items until there is enough in one to make it worth her taking to one of the various dealers.
This is the first level of domestic recycling.

The second level consists of a man who walks up and down outside our building each morning, crying, in a sing-song way, something that sounds like “o my cheeky boy” (sooner or later, I will ask for a translation, but, right now, I’m enjoying the incongruity of this odd call…). He gives immediate cash for newspaper, tin, cardboard, bottles, wood, etc on the spot.
However, the housekeeper will not use him, saying darkly that his prices are cheating prices; but he is the easy option if you want a quick return.

The third level belongs to the women who collect all our rubbish and sweep the stairwells.
Once they have amassed the apartment block’s rubbish and it is deposited in the rubbish cabin (which stands next to one of the block’s perimeter walls), they then have liberty to sort through it.

From my high-rise flat, I look down and watch their work. What can be left, I wonder, after the housekeeper’s previous sift? You’d be amazed. Bits of fabric, paper-clips, empty biro pens, rubber door-stops, old but whole vegetables, used yoghurt pots – all are grist to this mill.
The cleaning women are on to a good thing too – the professional classes who inhabit these flats have lots to throw away.
(They have their angry moments though. I witnessed a stand-up argument in which a sweeper was criticising one housekeeper who was failing to sort her flat’s rubbish into wet/organic matter and dry matter. As the sweeper said, it wasn’t very nice for her to have to pick through old bones as well as everything else. I took her point).


The casual visitor to Bombay can also witness this kind of recycling in action. The visitor will often see children or poor women carrying huge, white plastic-fabric sacks, sometimes as big as themselves, along the streets. Well, these bags are either full of accumulated rubbish (from businesses or homes), and are being carried to a central point for a thorough picking, or are full of already picked material (e.g. rags) being taken to a dealer.
It is one of the hardest sights for a foreigner to face – on a roadside, an arthritic, filthy & silent old woman, surrounded by half a dozen or so of those large packages of smelling waste, is slowly gouging and poking into the mess in order to find tiny re-sellables.

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And what happens to this stuff then? Has the city such a well heeled, or responsibly civic side, that it can afford huge plants to recycle these materials?
Er, no. It tries – but it could never cope with all.
Interested in where the recycled rubbish goes?
One of the most illuminating trips a visitor to the city can take is one to the slum-district of Dharavi. A tour company called Reality Tours will undertake to show you, for a few hundred rupees, the multiplicity of cottage industries in this deprived part of town. As you wander through alley after alley (though – be warned - an alley will often serve double as a sewer-ditch here), it is fascinating to see how this so-called slum acts as the digestive system of the city.
It is like being in the depths of Dickens’ Victorian London. As you peer into what appears to be dark and broken workshops, you see thick and sooty faces, sweating at their tasks: renovating old paint tins and oil-drums, which are being scrubbed clean (one shudders at the amount of lead these labourers must be taking in); dead computer-drives and used hypodermic syringes (yuk) are being hammered into fragments, for later shredding into tiny plastic chips; domestic batteries are being snapped in two, the metals sorted; shoe-soles remoulded – and so all this detritus becomes ready for re-use.

In an almost casual aside, your guide will tell you that so efficient (and cheap, and uninterested in expensive health & safety rules, no doubt) is Dharavi that much of Europe’s used plastic goods are shipped here, broken up, and exported back to the West as raw material.

It’s a sort of recycling Heaven… well, you couldn’t call it Heaven… a recycling Hell.
If I recommend one thing that all visitors to Bombay should do, this tour is it.

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The funny thing is that there is a sly, self-deprecating joke that Mumbaikers make about the millions of voracious rats and the crows here. It is also a comment on the city’s overwhelmed refuse service. “Without the rats and crows” they smile “who would clean up the city?”

And now you know the answer. The rag pickers… and the labourers of Dharavi. What I am wondering is: what is the human cost of all this messing about in filth?


Links: Reality Tours of Dharavi and BBC report on Dharavi
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