Recycling - The images of children and women sifting through garbage on the street, in dumpsters,  and under overpasses brings up a turmoil of emotions.  On the one hand: brilliant!  This is as green as we can get: everything is sorted through and anything of value is sold off to be recycled.  But O what a grim existence, bare handedly picking through other people's rubbish.  And yet, these people are not merely holding out their hands asking for a handout, they are doing something constructive to feed themselves and they serve the community as a whole: less garbage for the municipality to handle, at least for these products, lower production costs with the recycled matter.  I felt particularly frustrated as I folded perfectly usable cardboard into the bin this morning.  Even in Delhi, someone would be earning money from stacks of cardboard, old glass and plastic.  Why then do we in the west have to pay taxes to have our materials recycled?  Yes, I do know the answer: the dollar cost of raw materials to us is less than the dollar cost of recycling, but we have decided that the non-dollar cost to our environment is worth more to us than the dollars used in recycling.  I still have issues with this: a)before I paid taxes for recycling I dumped my own materials at central points as I did my shopping AND 20 years ago I even got paid a few cents per pound of material! and b) the data is ambiguous on how much of an environmental toll our systems of recycling take.

Both of my pictures were taken on the Ahsunulla Road along the Buri Ganga river.  We spent about an hour on this road managing almost a mile at snail's pace.  The one picture is taken under a bridge - the overpass is an impromptu garbage heap where a couple of men have parked and the young fellow is stooped with bag in hand gleaning.  Incidentally I didn't see any men going through the rubbish. Here in Delhi I see men wheeling enormous bales of old plastic on their bikes to someone who will pay for it.  Can we deduce that the children and women get something for the gathering and then the men get a bit more for collecting a larger volume and hauling it off to someone who will in turn get it to a recycling facility?  The other picture shows two men focused on sorting industrial waste - they had four baskets in front of them and one had rubber pieces and another metal in it.  From the car I failed to identify the other two. 

Perhaps we could move to a (tax deductible) charitable donation of recyclable materials rather than paying taxes for recycling pick up.:)  employing those seeking manual labour at the sorting facility. :)