PlastiCity

Before reaching the dumping ground, returning to the city’s shores or being caught elsewhere, various kinds of plastics are rerouted from and through a diverse set of sites and relations. People that collect plastic negotiate and create networks in order to access different areas of the city, each with different quantities and qualities of plastic.

In wealthier and higher-producing areas of the city which often receive waste pick-up services, plastics go through many hands as they travel between private and public spaces; many are sold directly from households to bhangarwalas with larger carts or otherwise collected by municipal employees, domestic workers and ragpickers.Smaller-scale collections also exist in areas producing fewer plastics and which are not serviced by the municipal corporation in waste collection.

In Sathe Nagar Vimal Khillare buys garlic from the market to exchange for plastics segregated by mostly women in households in the morning before her second job working in a cake factory. She sells her assortment of oil, yogurt and cleaning containers, water bottles and sandals— bulkier, materially simple and relatively clean plastics— at a kilo-rate to a scrap dealer. Through her extra plastics income she has been able to support herself and her children as a single mother. What plastic escapes these exchanges?

After collectors — garlic sellers, bhangarwalas and garbage truck drivers among them— gather their plastics and other recyclables, they are often sold to scrap dealers, in whose shops and spaces plastic is further segregated and stored before they are sold to larger dealers or recyclers. While some scrap dealers specialize in a particular form of plastic— PET bottles or remote controls received directly from companies for example— Dilip Chavan receives and sells a diverse number of plastics by the kilo. These plastics are often known less by their chemical composition, such as PET or PVC, and more by how they feel (soft or hard), sound or by their common commodity form (chappal).

NGOs across the city have changed and redirected the composition and destination of plastic flows in the areas in which they operate. One such NGO, Aakar Mumbai, began working with women who pick plastic waste from garbage bins along the western line in 2004. They partnered with the BMC to coordinate the arrival of municipal trucks, so that the women pickers could take plastic from bins before they are transported elsewhere or collected by municipal employees.

In 2014 with support from the United Nations Development Programme and Hindustan Unilever the BMC set up dry-waste segregation centers to be run by Aakar Mumbai. With this infrastructure, they collect pre-segregated dry waste from mostly already-serviced households and societies with bins. The few segregation centers set up are the “pilot” portion of a larger vision by the UNDP, which is working to develop Extended Producer Responsibility guidelines to scale these projects.

The waste centers have also changed local supply chains. Aakar Mumbai sells plastic directly to larger vendors and waste pickers also sell directly to Aakar Mumbai rather than small-scale scrap dealers. Many of the plastics they collect from bins are by other means of collection considered low-value either because of their light-weight and/or compositional complexity. These plastics they send to cement companies. What kinds of plastic collection are enabled by the scale of recycling bins, trucks and segregation centers? What kinds of plastic collection are enabled by the scale of recycling bins, trucks and segregation centers and the organizations of labor they entail?