As my research on climate and wastepickers progresses, I’ve been working with Chintan to identify several areas in Delhi that might serve as case studies of local recycling efforts and their relationship to emissions reductions. The volume and composition of waste recycled by wastepickers in a specific geographical area is probably the most crucial bit of information in any attempt to account for their climate change mitigation work, so we’ve decided to begin in the areas with the best waste data. Last week, AP Peace Fellow Jacqui Kotyk and I visited one such area, Chintan’s micro-recycling center on the outskirts of the city. Check out the video below:

In the last week I discovered how wastepickers in Delhi are unwittingly converting my breakfast into lucrative carbon credits without receiving a cent of the profits.

Every morning before heading off to the Chintan office I eat a bowl of cornflakes with a banana. It’s both the minor indulgence of a Midwestern American guy living abroad and a method of giving my stomach one break per day from the spicy and voluminous curries, dals, and masala dishes that otherwise constitute my meals.

"The Usual"

"The Usual"

Several days ago I looked up from the little archipelago of flakes floating in my milk to the cereal box and banana peel, curious about their fate.  Like most kitchen waste in Delhi, they’ll be tossed in the trashcan together. I try to separate the recyclables from the organics, but I suspect that once they leave the kitchen they are all mixed up anyway.

Since this is a common “service apartment,” there is a gentleman named Radu who lives with the landlord downstairs and swings by occasionally to clean and empty the trash. I’m always curious where the heck it goes. There is no curbside pickup; I see no large dustbins anywhere on the block; and unlike my first apartment in Delhi, here there is no independent door-to-door wastepicker who rings the bell each day to collect the waste.

In situations like this, the family helpers often take the garbage directly to the neighborhood “dhalao,” or disposal unit. So today I marched over to the dhalao nearby, where I met a group of wastepickers meticulously segregating the incoming trash into organics, which they can’t use, and recyclables, which they can. It is here where my banana peel and cereal box part ways.

The Dhalao

The dhalao in my neighborhood. The dump bin in the foreground is full of waste that the wastepickers can't recycle. Behind the bin inside the structure I met a half dozen men segregating waste.

The brunt of waste in dhalaos comes directly from private residences, and the rest arrives on the rickshaws and backs of the wastepickers themselves. Dhalaos provide small but crucial space for segregation in an otherwise incomprehensibly dense city. City trucks then collect what remains after the wastepickers have finished sorting at the dhalaos and transport it to the city dumps.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

Here’s where it gets crazy. Such thoroughly sorted waste is perfect for composting.  And as I wrote last week, composting is one method of keeping wet waste out of landfills where it would otherwise decompose under anaerobic conditions, releasing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. So the two government entities in the area, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) have teamed up with a private firm to create a composting unit to earn greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits.

I visited this composting unit, in Okhla, and spoke with the manager.  The 200 tons of pre-segregated organic waste that arrives each day is delivered for free by the NDMC and MCD. It comes mostly from dhalaos, and because the waste has been pre-sorted by the wastepickers, there are huge savings for the composting unit and city. In fact, the manager was surprisingly deferential and spoke of the necessity of the wastepickers in his business model. After seven weeks of windrow composting, my banana peel becomes organic fertilizer, which is then sold to a wholesale fertilizer company for profit.  The wastepickers, at present, see none of the proceeds.

Bags of organic fertilizer ready to be sold from the Okhla composting unit.

Bags of organic fertilizer, the final product of the Okhla composting plant, ready to be trucked off and sold to a fertilizer wholesaler.

This project also has been approved for greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM is an offset scheme developed through the Kyoto Protocol whereby industrialized countries with emission-reduction commitments can finance and implement emission-reducing projects in developing countries in order to help meet their own Kyoto targets.

The Okhla composting plant is slated to receive emissions reduction credits amounting to 234,231 metric tones of CO2 equivalent over a seven-year period. At current carbon prices this amounts to roughly 3.5 million dollars. Who knows what the firm’s initial investment in the composting unit was, but it’s clear that the land was free, the waste is delivered for free, and the hard work of the wastepickers effectively subsidizes the composting unit. Composting is a great thing for the climate, but if those who are responsible for its benefits are shut out of the process, social justice is jettisoned for green profit.

In pursuit of even more CDM credits and some electricity, the city now has plans to site a waste-to-energy plant next door. Since waste-to-energy plants often burn dry, combustible waste to heat their boilers and turn their turbines, they are in direct competition with the wastepickers for the city’s recyclable waste content. They also have poor track records in developing countries and many times have worse energy and emissions balances than traditional recycling of the sort that wastepickers undertake. It’s a shame that in pursuit of ostensibly “clean” energy, the livelihoods of some India’s hardest working urban poor are jeopardized.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

The good news is that wastepickers and NGOs who support them are beginning to organize around these issues.  At the recent climate talks in Bonn, a coalition of wastepickers from around the world held a roundtable discussion and press conference to a packed audience in order to address unsustainable CDM projects that affect their work. Chintan is among this dynamic global network of activists who are pressing hard for more inclusive, rational, and sustainable policies on waste and climate.

I’ve been asked by several readers about the connection between wastepickers and climate change, since that’s the focus of the policy research I’m undertaking for Chintan this summer. In an effort to respond to these questions with pith and punch, below is a quick primer on municipal solid waste, greenhouse gases, and informal recycling in 20 steps. This is by no means comprehensive; I’ve resisted plunging into the hard science or hairy dynamics of carbon market mechanisms, but would be glad to go down that road in the comments section or email for those who are interested.  Here goes:

1.    For most of last week it topped out at over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in New Delhi.

2.    Consequently, I felt like this poor fool:

Chillin'

Chillin'

3.    Yet this has nothing to do with climate and everything to do weather.

4.    Weather is the daily meteorological and environmental conditions in an area, such as heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness.

5.    Climate, on the other hand, is the moving average of weather patterns and events over a period of time (the standard length of time for our purposes is 30 years).

6.    Unfortunately, the climate is changing – our averages are climbing.

7.    This is a bummer for many Americans, because we tend to like Florida, intact glaciers, and charismatic mega-fauna like polar bears. But we hate heat waves, wildfires, and suffocating fish.

8.    It’s even more devastating for many Indians, because changing rainfall and monsoon patterns will affect scarce water resources, threaten biodiversity, and hit the rural poor in the agricultural sector particularly hard.

9.    Global climate change is partly driven by anthropogenic (human-induced) emissions of several greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).

10.    According to the World Resources Institute, the waste sector accounts for about 3.8% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. In India this figure is nearly double – 6.7%.

11.    Emissions from the waste sector take two primary forms: 1) carbon dioxide is released from the production, distribution, and use of consumer goods that are ultimately thrown away; and 2) methane, which is roughly 72 times more potent than CO2 over a 20 year time horizon, is emitted from landfills into the atmosphere during the anaerobic decomposition of a city’s garbage.

Informal recyclers working at the peak of the Okhla dump

Informal recyclers working at the peak of the Okhla dump

12.    Think of it like this – every item in the heap of trash at your landfill represents the end point of a very long process that includes extraction and processing of raw materials; manufacture of products; transportation of materials and products to markets; use by consumers; and eventually waste management.

13.    Virtually every step along this “life cycle” impacts greenhouse gas emissions. In the early and middle stages, CO2 is released from power plants burning coal to supply electricity to factories, from trucks and ships running on petroleum, and so on. If a product is incinerated at the end of its life, CO2 is released along with other toxic emissions called dioxins and furans.  Alternatively, if it is landfilled, methane seeps out for several decades. Either way the atmosphere loses.

14.    Thus, reducing, re-using, recycling, and composting the various streams of municipal solid waste can mitigate both carbon dioxide and methane emissions. It takes much less energy to use recycled inputs in manufacturing than it takes to extract, process, and transport virgin materials. And if we “close the loop” of production with recycling, composting, and waste prevention, these products never need to be burned or buried.

In this diagram, MTCE stands for Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent. In scenario 1 up top, disposing of 100 tons of office paper in the standard fashion results in emissions of 62 MTCE. In scenario 2, recycling some of this paper results in a REDUCTION of 65 MTCE. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency

In this diagram, MTCE stands for Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent. In scenario 1 up top, disposing of 100 tons of office paper in the standard fashion results in emissions of 62 MTCE. In scenario 2, recycling some of this paper results in a REDUCTION of 65 MTCE. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency

15.    For example, a groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Eco-Cycle, and G.A.I.A. found that if Americans could simply reduce waste generation 1% each year and divert 90% of our discards from landfills and incinerators by the year 2030, the greenhouse gas savings would amount to closing 1/5 of all coal-fired power plants in the country.

16.    Delhi’s waste problem is gargantuan. This is partly due to the booming population in India and the rapid rate of urbanization.

17.    But it’s also due to mismanagement. For a megalopolis of 15 million people, Delhi has just three open dumps, all of which are unsanitary and overflowing. The city generates over 6,000 metric tons of waste per day. Yet only half of the city’s tipper trucks run at any one time, there is a dearth of garbage bins in public places, and residents very rarely segregate their waste.  Much of it, frankly, is just thrown on the street.

18.    The city has come up with all kinds of quick-fix solutions, from burning the waste to making it into pellets to fuel power plants, to compressing it into bales, wrapping it in plastic, and stacking it a half mile in the air. But the best climate and waste models out there suggest that good old recycling and composting, while not as sexy as these technologies, offer greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than landfillng and incineration, and often have superior net energy balances as well.

19.    Here’s where the wastepickers come in.  They are India’s most efficient recyclers. In Delhi, informal wastepickers, junk dealers, and small recyclers number around 100,000 people.  The average wastepicker recycles 60 kilograms per day.  This saves the municipality a ton of money and reduces emissions.

Okhla wastepicker families taking a break

Okhla wastepicker families taking a break

20.    In the final analysis, it is clear that wastepickers are owed a climate debt.  The thrust of my research this summer is to calculate this climate debt and help Chintan craft a campaign to connect these climate entrepreneurs to resources that will facilitate their environmentally friendly livelihoods.

Recycling plastic bottles at Ghazipur

Recycling plastic bottles at Ghazipur

In India, education is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution. This strikes me as a worthy inclusion, one that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Declarations and constitutions are often bloated with concepts like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” whose scope and interpretation remain nebulous. Happiness, it turns out, was synonymous with “property,” and terms like “liberty” are too often strategically invoked in the political sphere until they’ve been gutted of intent, transformed to clichés, or used to galvanize people into nationalism. Raise your hand if you remember “Freedom Fries.”

In comparison, the Indian right to education seems clear and tangible at first glance. And yet, as I visited a series of elementary school classes for wastepicker children in recent weeks, the complexity of a right to education became apparent.

A young wastepicker girl peers over the portable chalk board during Hindi class.

A young wastepicker girl peers over the portable chalk board during Hindi class.

Here’s the description of a young Indian schoolboy waiting for the bus in Bombay in the early 1950s from the Salmon Rushdie novel I’m now reading: “…washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-story hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue striped elastic belt with a snake buckle, satchel over my shoulder…” Here we have the prototypical schoolboy, gearing up for education with a capital E.

Many wastepicker children, on the other hand, are born into a situation in which the demands of helping their families earn a livelihood are in conflict with going to school in the traditional sense. Chintan’s education program, “No Child in Trash,” bridges this divide by holding classes for wastepicker children directly in their communities. I visited two classes in the Nizamuddin neighborhood. One took place on a patch of dust under a tree, amid the roil of wandering goats and middle-aged men eating thalis; and the other under a small tarp strung over a concrete nook at the end of a labyrinthine network of alleys and crowded residences.

A Chintan teacher (center) passes out handmade puppets to her students so they can enact a story they've read. This particular teacher also runs a small community library for wastepicker kids.

A Chintan teacher (center) passes out handmade puppets to her students so they can enact a story they've read. This particular teacher also runs a small community library for wastepicker kids.

When it comes down to it, the right to education is the right to learn and grow, whether or not that learning takes place in school. To conflate the two creates an unfortunate social division between those who can afford (and who are permitted) to wear their bright white shorts and suspenders, and those who cannot. Chintan’s model of organizing is finely tuned to the quotidian realities of the wastepicker communities; instead of lambasting parents for not sending their kids to school, they train teachers to work directly in the wastepicker enclaves and villages spread around Delhi.

The attention and initiative of these kids was impressive. The commotion surrounding them was enough to keep me distracted, but somehow through the din they quietly and methodically took Hindi dictation, paired off in groups to read, and participated in puppetry and name games. Sure, there was a random four-year-old with a runny nose goofing around here and there, but in general their fierce concentration and reverence for their teachers blew my mind.  One has the impression that they know the stakes are high.

A Chintan teacher helps a young wastepicker boy with pronunciation.

A Chintan teacher helps a young wastepicker boy with pronunciation.

There are two age levels of children taking part in the program. Those aged three to five are in a group whose Hindi name means “Young Corridor.” Chintan’s goal is to act as a corridor, leading them to the public school system in Delhi.  They focus on two subjects, Hindi and Mathematics. Nearly half of the 200 children in Chintan’s programs have indeed made the successful transition into city schools.

The older children, aged six to fourteen, have mixed educational histories.  Some are in public school, others have dropped out or never went, and most have been employed as wastepickers for years. Crucially, Chintan’s goals with them are fluid. Despite high profile child labor laws in India that demand children stop working and go to school, the situation on the ground is that many wastepicker kids are not going to end up making the cut to get into the municipal education system.  For them, the Chintan teachers focus on reading stories and storytelling. If one of the major obstacles to social inclusion is that policies are formulated only by those who have a “voice,” there seems to me no better educational pursuit than helping children read the stories of others and find the means to tell their own.

Children in the Young Corridor cadre read along with their older classmate.

Children in the Young Corridor cadre read along with their older classmate.

I asked Rajneesh, Chintan’s education programs director, what he thought was the biggest accomplishment of “No Child in Trash.” Surprisingly, after some facts and figures about kids who have made it into public school, he said that one of the greatest successes was a one-day health clinic that they arranged for the wastepicker children in this very neighborhood. Though this happened before I arrived, it has been documented in video by others:

If children are not healthy enough to make it to class each day, if they are overlooked by the formal education system, if they lack the time to study or the means to travel, then the right to education will remain perpetually trapped in the ink of the Constitution. Chintan and these kids are transforming what that right means, giving it a living, breathing, complex reality.

Class in the shade of a tree.

Class in the shade of a tree.

The new one rupee coin is arguably the hippest coin ever minted. The front is smooth and spare, depicting the number one; the word RUPEE in English and Hindi; and a hand entering the frame from the right, giving the thumbs-up sign. The two rupee coin is equally stylish, but here the hand flashes us the peace sign.

On Sunday I was sipping scalding chai in an alleyway café, wondering what vanguard graphic designer at the Reserve Bank of India had come up with the slick new concept, when it occurred to me that the hand gestures were functional. A thumb in the air doesn’t indicate hitchhiking or a general state of mirth, but the number “one.” Likewise, the peace sign means “two.” These coins were likely designed for the 40% of India’s population that is illiterate. I then proceeded to comb through the bills in my pocket, finding the bespectacled and slightly smiling Gandhi on each and every denomination.  So there it is, I thought, the paradox of populist cash.

I had planned to travel to Ghazipur Landfill at sundown to meet the wastepicker community that lives next to the dump. Instead of sitting at the café staring at Gandhi on my rupees for the intervening hours, I decided to hop in a rickshaw and spend the afternoon at Raj Ghat, the memorial to Gandhi at the site where he was cremated after his assassination in 1948.

The memorial consists of a black granite platform open to the sun, strewn with vibrant marigolds. An eternal flame burns atop the platform, and a grassy park rolls away in all directions. It is appropriately understated for a man who lived his life committed to simple and uncompromising principles. My guidebook informed me, in that overly pat guidebook sort of way, “India’s heart lies here.”

Gandhi himself found the country’s strength and identity not in titanic personalities, but at the margins of society. India’s heart for him resided in the villages, in the overworked and underpaid indentured laborers, the mill workers, the farmers, the poor. We in the West remember him as a radical pacifist, but he was equally a radical democrat. The wastepickers were much on my mind at Raj Ghat; I believe Chintan moves in this very spirit, advocating for a dignified existence and reasonable working conditions for Delhi’s urban poor.

The day then twisted itself into a metaphorical knot as I came upon Gandhi’s “Seven Social Sins” inscribed on an outer wall of the memorial:

As I wandered around the landfill and wastepicker village in Ghazipur later that evening, speaking with residents and visiting homes, these social sins were clanging about in my head.

India is now experiencing both rapid urbanization and increasing volumes of waste, and a high GDP growth rate is sacrosanct in policy circles. In this context, overcoming “Politics Without Principles” and “Commerce Without Morality” will require far more than outsourcing waste management to private corporations or producing populist coins and bills.

Many of the rights and freedoms that wastepickers seek – freedom from harassment, adequate space for their work, clear legal recognition, access to waste, access to education, access to health care – have been taken up at one time or another by local governmental bodies. Yet piecemeal legislation and technological remedies are no solution for what remain structural problems.

In the end, pervasive “social sins” demand a powerful social response – and this is exactly what Chintan and the wastepickers are mounting.

Recently I hopped on the back of a motorcycle and rode through the arcade video game that is Delhi’s highway system, across the Yamuna River to the outskirts of the city. Each week Chintan hosts community meetings with wastepickers in various locales, and this week’s meeting took place in the gritty borough of Bhopura. Most of Delhi’s wastepickers live on the periphery, both figuratively and literally - structural violence has pushed them to the margins of society and the hijacking of public space by urban elites has brushed them to the physical margins of the city.

Frankly, I expected squalor. Perhaps like most Americans I’ve been spoon-fed “poverty porn” for too long, because despite earnest attempts to the contrary, during the ride I was anticipating something pretty crude: an encounter with abjection. I was surprised, then, to arrive at small enclave of “chuggis,” or huts, in the absence of any stench. This was no landfill, but an area to live and work provided to the wastepickers by the local “godam mallik,” a patron of sorts.

Neither was there a prevailing sense of pathos. I was met by a resilient and accommodating group of families who were overly concerned with whether or not my backpack might get dusty, if I needed another cup of tea, if I was comfortable enough on the lawn chair while they sat on a large black tarp.

This week the organizer, Santu, read an article documenting the resolution of a decades-old land dispute between the local government and a group of farmers. In a nutshell, the farmers’ land had been seized for development in an eminent domain sort of scenario, and they’d been paid a nominal fee for it. They fought for years to get proper compensation, taking it up the chain of courts. In the end they lost. The warning to the wastepickers was clear: the spatial freedom they enjoy here exists in legal limbo, and while their homes are not in immediate threat, they may be down the road. The crowd was galvanized and several lingered after the meeting to plot strategy.

I’m guilty of having deployed the trite phrase “a humbling experience” in the past. When we say we’ve been humbled, we often mean we’ve been forced to reconsider the affluence and banality of our daily lives. The Bhopura meeting, on the other hand, was a kind of humility in converse - expecting the sensationalism of extreme poverty, I was confronted instead with the richness of one poor community, its rituals and formalities, its jokesters, its concerns, its kites.

My first morning in Delhi, demolished by jet lag and seeking refuge from the heat, I wandered out of my austere apartment, rounded the corner, and promptly saw a motorized rickshaw get in a wreck. Instantly a dozen people swooped in to lift it back up onto its wheels, check to make sure that the two women who had tumbled out were okay, and commence arguing about who would shoulder the blame.

The streets of Delhi are a veritable electron cloud of activity – in the mix are bicycle rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, cars, motorbikes, pedestrians, all manner of vendors, hawkers, and occasionally, cattle:

As I learned yesterday, somewhere in this flux there are also “cycle kabaris,” or waste recyclers on wheels. Before beginning my research on municipal waste and greenhouse gas emissions in Delhi, I’ll be spending the next few weeks with the various communities Chintan supports in order to better understand the topography of waste collection and informal recyclers.

The cycle kabari gang meets with Chintan weekly to air concerns and strategize. Yesterday we collected on the manicured lawns of Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi amid chirping birds and furtive young couples picnicking on the grass.

Cycle kabaris are essentially one-man businesses, using a modified bicycle to ride around designated neighborhoods and purchase recyclables, such as old magazines and newspapers, directly from homeowners. They yell “kabari waala! kabari walla!” to announce their arrival, and residents descend with paper, plastic, and even metals in hand. Cycle kabaris then sell up the chain to larger, bulk recyclers at a higher rate to make a living. Unlike wastepickers, they do very little segregation of raw waste.

The kabaris spoke of barriers to entry to their traditionally recognized zones of operation. Although the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has guaranteed them the right to collect and purchase recyclables from individual homeowners in designated neighborhoods, some residential block guards persist in either barring them outright or charging them an exorbitant “entry fee” to carry out their work. Chintan documents and aggregates complaints like these in order to help informal recyclers solve problems and build capacity.

The number of participants at the Lodhi meetings has been down in recent months, partly because some cycle kabari workers have lost their homes – sometimes on public land – to city development in the area. They have thus been forced to move to other corners of the city.

Yet the camaraderie among these men is immediately palpable. Though from different religions and backgrounds, they assured me they don’t compete with each other. They know whose turf is whose and respect the code, as it were. Prakash Shukla, a Chintan organizer who meets with the cycle kabaris each week summarized their philosophy thus: “To break one stick is simple, but to break a whole bundle of sticks is nearly impossible.”

Cycle Kabari