Hey folks, Pratham here.
Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.
We've all grown up assuming the West recycles beautifully while India drowns in overflowing bins.
But in reality, it’s the other way around, especially on things that are worth recovering.
The United States recycles somewhere around 5-6% of its plastic whereas your neighbourhood kabadiwala pulls back a far larger share of everything that has value, because to him a kilo of scrap is his income and people chase income a lot harder than they chase a cause.
Today's paradox: India built the best recycling system on Earth by accident, and then spent years trying to replace it because it looked too poor to work.
While the common assumption is that this is unorganised, the reality says otherwise.
If you think about it, your raddi (trash) leaves the house only because someone pays you for it.
The kabadiwala buys it by weight at a live price, sorts it into a dozen grades, and sells it up a chain of bigger dealers until it reaches a recycler who turns it back into something usable.
That chain exists because everyone in it is benefitting, or in this case monetising.
Around 95% of India's e-waste is handled by the informal sector, including roughly 15 lakh waste pickers who receive little formal support despite underpinning the country's recycling system.
No government scheme built this system, and no startup did either, because it grew on its own the moment scrap had a price attached to it.
It helps to know what the systems we admire were really doing.
For years, many Western countries boosted their reported recycling figures by exporting large volumes of plastic waste to Asia for processing.
When China shut its doors to foreign scrap in 2018, that number fell apart, and a lot of what had been called recycling turned out to be a long boat ride to someone else's landfill.
India was recycling the whole time, at home, for money, and getting no credit for it because the people doing it were poor.
Then we decided the system needed fixing or in this case replacing, so we brought in licensed recyclers, the compliance portals, the producer-responsibility rules, and the whole machinery of making waste look modern.
But the funny thing is that the actual garbage kept flowing where it always had, through the kabadiwala.
Only the paperwork went somewhere new.
The formal system had learned to generate the certificate without doing much recycling, while the kabadiwala kept doing the recycling that no certificate ever credited to him.
While this is interesting, it’s not all rainbows.
In the e-waste lanes of Seelampur in Delhi, workers pull gold and copper out of old circuit boards with acid baths and open fires, breathing lead and mercury with almost no protection.
One study of workers there found barely 1 in 10 using any safety gear, and lead sitting in their bodies at levels that do them lasting harm, and many of the hands doing this work belong to children.
By now you’re probably wondering why we didn’t double down to work with kabadiwala’s officially?
Bengaluru did something similar with Hasiru Dala.
The recovery rates were always world-class.
But basic safety standards were still missing such as gloves, a card, and the right to keep doing the work without being treated as a nuisance.
Given how unorganised this is city to city, it’s tough to find ways to support them with these directly.
We had the most efficient recycling market on earth, and we mistook its poverty for its failure.
The kabadiwala needed us to see him as infrastructure rather than as an eyesore, and to spend on making his work safe what we instead spent on making it look modern.
Every few months a new startup promises to fix Indian recycling, and I keep thinking the same thing. the fix was never going to be a cleverer system, only some respect for the one we already had.
Hit reply and tell me: when you handed your raddi to the kabadiwala this month, did it ever occur to you that he might be better at his job than any recycling company you have heard of?
I read every email.
Until next week,
Pratham