3rd November
We were met by our guide (from the Acorn Foundation) at Mahim train station close to the city within the city, that is known as the Dharavi slum. Dharavi covers 223 hectares of land, is home to over 1 million people and with a diverse range of industries and communities, it generates $1.4 billion in revenues each year. The intention of the visit was to see the recycling precinct, we got much more, meeting the rag pickers, segregators, reprocessors and brokers, seeing the operations at work and drinking chai, of course.
The first thing you notice upon entering Dharavi is the energy, activity and resourcefulness of the people, and the plasticised aluminium packaging on the floor. The place is a hive of activity, lots of businesses, street stalls selling a variety of food and drinks, many people and goats, and in between this, rickshaws and trucks squeezing there way through. As we walked through the narrow lanes you notice the overwhelming range of activities, from stripping down crash helmets, car parts, shoes, washing machines, other white goods, electrical items, wooden items, ball point pens, the list goes on. Everything and anything of value has already been collected by the community to be sorted and processed before being taken to a buy back trader, if there is no end market (value) it is left on the ground.
Our first stop off was an outdoor sorting area accessed by walking across a huge sewage pipe under the bridge that crosses Mahim Creek, adjacent to the pipe were small shacks connected to the sorting area. Sacks of materials that are collected by rag pickers or dropped off by trucks are thrown from the road, dropping down several feet to this sorting area, where groups of men and women strip the plastics from the remnants of computers, and wash the granulated plastics. The people we met here were members of the Acorn Dharavi Project and included some committee members. The Acorn project is working to get the rag pickers recognised by Government, to improve their working conditions and social status. These people are the recycling industry of Mumbai and their achievements are huge, there are over 15,000 single room factories, over 80% of Mumbai’s plastics are reused or recycled here, and employment opportunities created for over 250,000 people.
Then the the warehouses, with our guide, a committee member from the Dharavi Projects.
The first warehouse opened up into an area where plastics were being granulated, bags of pre-sorted plastics were poured into the hopper and granulated plastics were collected in another sack, ready for washing. you couldn’t see beyond a few meters as bags of these sorted plastics piled high blocking the view of the rest of the warehouse. Our guide effortlessly climbed up and over these sacks, beckoning us to follow, and here was the sorting area. 5 people squatted on the floor, these were the segregators of plastic bottles, containers, breaking down items into component parts, ball point pens, toys, coat hangers, just about anything you can think of that is made from plastic (except film plastics). A great welcome & time to stop for chai...
In another warehouse on the ground floor we saw the plastics being sorted into type, granulated & washed as before. Flaked plastics were dried on the hot tin roofs before going through quality control on the second floor, where coloured pieces were removed from the flake – this ensures high quality and the best prices for the materials. The dry sorted plastics are then sacked and stacked ready for the brokers. The view from the rooftops was amazing, more storage space for stuff, in Dharavi every space conceivable is being utilised.
At his Dharavi site, Mr Upendra a trader in the fibre markets oversees the baling of card and paper collected from Mumbai by the rag pickers. As part of the Acorn project he guarantees a price based on quality. He also provides a brokerage service between generators, usually large businesses in Mumbai and end markets (paper mills) in India. The group of companies operated by the family also includes hand-made paper products made from the recycled paper collected in Mumbai, a great example of closed loop recycling.
Dr Dan Knapp (Urban Ore) would refer to Dharavi as a Serial Resource Recovery Park, comprising a collective of collection points segregation and reprocessing warehouses and storage facilities for all different source separated plastics, paper, card, electrical items, textiles etc that either get sold to end markets or used in the manufacture of new products in Dharavi.
Pollution & hazardous materials are an issue, there is no pollution control and this is an area that in places could do with attention.
Dharavi is a community at risk of losing homes and livelihoods, the city of Mumbai like many other rapidly growing cities is running out of space to develop and Dharavi is on the agenda for redevelopment. When reading the rhetoric surrounding the £2 billion redevelopment proposals the Government claims they will provide 300 sq ft to all ground floor residents, if they have papers to prove they lived there prior to 1995, which they don’t have, and over 25,000 residents live on the first or second floors, they will not be recognised either.
Another factor that is threatening these peoples livelihoods is the risk that investment in waste management facilities, will take the form of mechanised Material Reclamation Facilities and final disposal solutions (incinerators) like those we see in the UK. Incineration is more polluting than coal fired power station, so this is not good news for climate change and with more proposals coming forward for funding through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for such projects, is not good news for livelihoods, homes, employment, innovation and carbon reduction.
Links
Acorn Foundation Dharavi Project (http://www.dharaviproject.org/)
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