The Invisible Hands Behind India's Recycling Revolution

Every day, long before most of us think about what happens to the plastic we throw away, someone is already sorting through it, separating what can be recovered from what cannot, and moving it into a vast informal network that eventually feeds India’s recycling industry. Waste pickers are among the least visible links in this chain, yet without their work, much of the material we expect to see recycled would never reach a recycling plant.

As India looks to build a more efficient circular economy, the question is no longer simply how much plastic we can recycle, but how we value the people who make that possible. In this conversation with Reader's Digest India, Swaroop K. V. R., Head of Waste Management, Sustainability and EPR at Srichakra Polyplast, explains how better segregation, technology and formalisation can strengthen the recycling chain—and why giving waste workers greater visibility, security and recognition is essential to its future.

India’s recycling story often begins at the recycling plant. You argue that it really begins much earlier—with the person picking a discarded bottle or piece of plastic off the street. Why has the waste picker remained so invisible in India’s circular-economy conversation?

India’s recycling ecosystem has historically relied heavily on informal collection networks. Long before a discarded bottle or piece of plastic reaches an organised recycling facility, waste pickers have already recovered it, identified material of value and brought it back into the recycling chain.

However, much of this activity takes place outside formal employment and procurement systems. The industry conversation has therefore tended to focus more on collection volumes, recycling capacity and recycled output, while the people responsible for the first stage of material recovery have received relatively limited recognition.

Formalization can help bridge this gap by bringing greater visibility and traceability into the upstream supply chain, while connecting waste pickers with safer working practices, social protection and more transparent commercial relationships.

For India’s circular economy to become stronger, the value chain must be viewed in its entirety. The recycling facility is an important part of that system, but so is the person who first recovers the material and enables it to return to productive use.

There is an interesting contradiction here: waste pickers are essential to the recycling economy, yet the more informal and fragmented the system becomes, the less value they seem to capture from the material they recover. Where does that value get lost?

A typical material chain can have several layers. A waste picker or household collector sells material to a local kabadiwala or small aggregator; it may then move to a larger aggregator or baler, then to a trader and finally to the recycler. In many instances, transactions in the first few levels remain cash-based, while formal billing begins only further up the chain.

Each layer performs some function, so the objective cannot simply be to remove every intermediary. The problem arises when the chain becomes unnecessarily fragmented and the person actually recovering, segregating or improving the material captures only a small proportion of the value eventually paid for it.

There is another form of value loss as well: poor segregation. If mixed or contaminated material moves through the chain without being properly sorted, the recycler eventually pays not only for usable plastic but also for material that has to be rejected and disposed of. In one of our operating examples, approximately 100 kg of incoming material may yield around 70 kg of usable feedstock, while the balance has to be sent to further downstream channels. That also means lower utilisation of processing capacity and additional handling and disposal costs.

The opportunity is therefore to make the chain more transparent and reward the people who are actually adding value to the material through collection, segregation, consistency and quality.

Sorting is often treated as a basic, low-value activity. But your experience suggests that poor segregation can affect everything downstream—from recovery rates and production efficiency to the quality of recycled plastic. Should we start thinking of sorting as a skilled part of the recycling industry?

Sorting is one of the most important stages in recycling because it determines the quality of material available for every process that follows. If plastics of different polymers, colours or applications are mixed together, or arrive with excessive contamination, the recycler has to spend considerably more time and resources separating them. It affects yield, machine utilization, operating efficiency and ultimately the quality of the recycled resin. From our experience, poor segregation and inconsistent feedstock quality remain among the biggest constraints facing the recycling industry.

The importance becomes even greater when we move towards higher-value applications. Food-contact rPET, for example, requires carefully controlled feedstock and processing; not all PET entering a recycling facility will be suitable for such applications. The incoming material has to meet strict requirements before it goes through washing, decontamination, extrusion and further processing.

This is why sorting should no longer be viewed as merely the manual separation of waste. Good sorting requires an understanding of polymers, contamination, colour, application requirements and quality specifications. We are therefore moving sorting upstream. Srichakra Reclamations, our wholly owned subsidiary and backward-integration arm, is establishing pre-segregation centres where material can be sorted before it reaches the recycling plants. We are already operating AI and NIR-based sorting at our Hyderabad centre. Each pre-segregation centre will have different sorting combinations, including polymer sorting and AI-plus-NIR technology. We also use such sorting capabilities within our recycling plants, but the objective is to move more of that work upstream so that the recycling plants can operate more efficiently.

As recycling becomes more quality- and compliance-driven, sorting will increasingly need to be recognised as a skilled and critical part of the value chain.

How much of a difference can better pre-segregation really make?

It can make a substantial difference to recovery. Today, if 100 kg of material reaches the recycling plant, we could end up making only around 65 kg of end product because of contamination, unwanted material and other losses. Through better pre-segregation, we are trying to increase that recovery to around 85 kg.

That means the amount of material that has to be handled as waste could come down from around 35 per cent to 15 per cent. It is therefore both an environmental and a business-efficiency intervention.

The pre-segregation centres collect material across multiple layers of the aggregation network, sort and prepare it, and then send it to our recycling plants. This gives us greater visibility over the material entering the system while also creating a more structured relationship with the people and businesses supplying it.

What are the hallmarks of Srichakra’s Responsible Sourcing Initiative (RSI)? What does it look like on the ground?

Responsible sourcing has to extend across the entire chain. Through the Responsible Sourcing Initiative, we are working on areas such as worker safety, prevention of child labour, access to social-protection schemes and more structured engagement with large aggregators and balers, smaller aggregators and kabadiwalas, as well as individual waste pickers. We are also working with organisations that are already active within these communities to support this transition. 

In Hyderabad, implementation currently covers all these tiers. The objective is not just to establish a procurement relationship but to address some of the issues affecting their lives and work. So the programme includes digital financial literacy, access to social-security mechanisms, facilitation of e-Shram cards, government insurance schemes NAMASTE registrations and Jan Dhan bank accounts. There is a strong focus on children as well, including childcare, education, local schools and community-based or after-school learning centres. On the occupational side, we are looking at health and safety, including PPE designed for waste workers, mechanisms for recording workplace injuries and measures to prevent them. The commercial side is equally important. Through Srichakra Reclamations and the Supplier Management Platform, the objective is to create greater transparency around rates and incentivise suppliers for better quality, consistency, quantity and reliability.

We are also developing a responsible-sourced-plastic practices curriculum for suppliers and the wider chain, covering areas such as business compliance, health and safety and responsible sourcing. The Circulate Initiative is our anchor partner for this work, with implementation partners on the ground in Hyderabad. We are also working on research and advocacy with urban local bodies and government agencies, including efforts to improve public understanding and recognition of the role of waste workers. The baseline assessment began in 2023, while ground implementation of the current initiative began in February 2025. The current project runs until December 2027, and we are considering a three-year extension.

How large is the programme currently?

As of September, in Hyderabad we have five large aggregators in the programme. These have 15 smaller aggregators within their networks, and we are engaging around 300 informal waste workers and waste pickers.

We are now looking at expanding the model to Bengaluru, as well as Chennai and Coimbatore. Our pre-segregation centres are intended to support recycling facilities across India. A centre is also planned in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu, alongside the development of Srichakra Polyplast’s Unit 3 there.

There is a larger social question here. If waste pickers increasingly move into housekeeping and other contractual jobs because they offer more predictable incomes, could India’s recycling system eventually face a labour shortage? And what would that mean for the circular economy?

There is a possibility that, as other employment opportunities grow, people may move away from waste collection. But that also makes it more important to make recovery work more secure and valuable for those who remain in it. Formalisation should not mean imposing a rigid employment structure on an ecosystem that has developed differently. It should mean creating greater predictability and transparency—fairer commercial relationships, better access to social protection, safer working conditions and recognition of the value these workers create. 

If people can see a more secure future in the work, there is greater incentive to remain in the system and build expertise.

How do you formalise the sector without taking away the flexibility that makes the informal system work?

The answer is gradual formalisation. The objective should be to create transparent pricing, incentives and social protection without unnecessarily disrupting the existing ecosystem.

Waste pickers, aggregators and recyclers all operate within an economic system, so any intervention has to recognise the commercial realities at each level. Formalisation should make the chain more transparent and accountable while ensuring that the people at the beginning of it are not disadvantaged.

Our reclamation centres are part of that approach. They allow us to establish more direct and structured relationships with suppliers while improving the quality of the material entering the recycling process.

What role does the consumer play in this system?

Consumers have a very important role because the quality of recycling begins with disposal. If all household waste is mixed together, the material becomes much harder to recover efficiently.

With plastics, it is also important to distinguish between rigid and flexible packaging. Rigid plastics, particularly bottles and similar packaging, have an established collection and recycling network. Flexible and multilayer packaging is more difficult to collect and process because it can contain multiple polymer layers and may be much harder to separate.

At the household level, better segregation can therefore make a significant difference. Door-to-door collectors may separate rigid plastics, metals, paper and other materials into different sacks, after which the material moves through the network of kabadiwalas, aggregators and balers before reaching recyclers.

Consumer education and responsible disposal are therefore an important part of strengthening the entire recycling chain.

What would success look like five years from now?

I would like to see a much stronger connection between source segregation, organised collection and high-quality recycling.

India already has a substantial collection network. The opportunity is to make that network more efficient and more transparent, with lower contamination and rejection rates, better traceability, stronger social protection for waste workers and more predictable incomes.

Ultimately, we want more recovered plastic to move back into manufacturing rather than being lost along the way. For me, formalisation is about making both the people and the material in this system more valuable.

That is the larger objective: building a circular economy in which collection, sorting, recycling and manufacturing are connected, while the people who make that system possible are recognised as an essential part of it.

About the expert: Swaroop K V R (Vijaya Raghava Swaroop Kongara) serves as the Head of Waste Management, Sustainability, and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) at Srichakra Polyplast