The parking lot man

Across the road from our hotel, there is a parking lot, lined along the perimeter with metal fencing and plenty of trash. Today I noticed and photographed a man leaning into the window of a white car, the lone vehicle in the parking lot at that early hour of 8AM. When I shared the photo with Danny, he mentioned that he'd seen this same guy in the parking lot, collecting recyclable materials.

After breakfast, I looked out the room window again and found that the piles of bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard had grown larger.

Not long after, he was joined by a second man, and they began to fill large plastic bags with the bottles and cans they had collected.

Recycling is not a standard option in India the way I'm used to in the Bay Area. All of the newspapers we read, water bottles we drink from, and shampoo and lotion bottles we use up go in the trash along with everything else. In fact, I thought there was no recycling to speak of here in India, that all the waste produced by the more than 1.1 billion people (plus tourists!) ended up in landfills somewhere or were dumped on the outskirts of the cities, exhausting precious land resources. And, for the most part, it does.

But Danny mentioned that people like this fellow in the parking lot make it their job to sort through the rubbish we leave behind and sell it to recycling plants. Upon further investigation, I found an article from The Independent in 2005. It stated:

“More than 1,000 people make their entire living scavenging here at the Ghazipur dump in down-at-heel north Delhi, where the city's refuse is consigned. They are recyclers of sorts. But, for them, recycling has nothing to do with environmentalism or the green movement - it is about daily survival.

“... The fashionable guidebooks to India pontificate about the damage that plastic bottles are doing to India's environment, and urge tourists to refuse to buy them. But children like Musida depend on the bottles for their livelihood. They can sell them on at one rupee [US $0.02] per kilogram.”

These "recycling collectors" scavage for anything that could be possibly be reusable and sellable, right down to rags and animal parts.

It's not a pretty job in the least, but I suppose I feel less bad about having to toss out so many plastic water bottles, knowing that it's supplying someone with a livelihood -- if picking through other people's filth can be called that.