Trashopolis S02 E05: Mumbai

Mumbai the richest city in India is filling up with trash this is Asia's largest slum millions live on mountains of garbage everything under the Sun is being recycled here from bottle caps to rats it's the Hindu cycle of life and death the miracle of trash in the magical world of Mumbai [Music] Mumbai one of the most exotic cities of all time a place of history of fortunes and empires and now of multinational corporations home to the rich whew and millions of poor with the population of 21 million and growing fast Mumbai is the fifth largest city in the world one of the most crowded and the dirtiest but in Mumbai trash isn't just garbage it's a commodity [Music] this is the Sanitation Depot for the K West Ward one of Mumbai's wealthiest here 700,000 live in an area roughly half the size of Manhattan and these sanitation workers have their work cut out for them we leave 425 metric tons of garbage every day from for only for this one every day 27,000 workers collect over 7,000 tons of trash with help from a new fleet of garbage trucks the old trucks used to spill garbage on their way to the dump these modern trucks keep the trash and the smell contained vehicle has a crew of nine it needs such a large crew because people don't leave their trash in a single place the crew has to go out and gather it but the sanitation department only collects trash from half of Mumbai's residents the richer half [Music] that leaves tons of trash lying in the streets every day and for savvy Indian entrepreneurs it's a goldmine I collect plastic bottles paper glass she earns about $200 a month when I have collected enough I sell it to the recycling plant she's not alone over a million undocumented Mumbai workers collect sell and recycle the city's trash but trash has always had a special place in the life of Mumbai 400 years ago Mumbai was little more than a string of small islands beyond precast is an urban historian at Princeton University there were farmers and fishing communities that lived on these seven different islands but then the British arrived and established headquarters here for their Indian trading empire and they called it Bombay under the British an extraordinary transformation took place the British threw so much trash in the waters that the seven islands of Bombay fused into one the creeks between the different islets get filled various linkages were built dams were built swamps were filled and by 1838 the seven islets had been forged into a single island city for its British rulers Bombay became a money machine it became a very flourishing port largely on opium trade to China but Bombay was also filthy the British had little interest in keeping the city clean [Music] today the Brits are gone and India has been independent since 1947 but some things haven't changed that much over half of Mumbai's population still lives without indoor plumbing no toilets no showers no sanitation this is Dorothy Mumbai's largest slum and the real-life home of the hit film Slumdog Millionaire 1 million people live here smack in the center of Mumbai but like much of India Darvey is filled with contradictions Deepak isnan is a former banker and founder of Mumbai magic tours this is Asia's largest slum and on the surface of it it appears like a group of people living in poverty but when you go inside it you find that terribly is a astonishing collection of enterprise there are people here hard-working people here that have made a whole livelihood out of recycling city garbage trucks don't collect trash in Dharavi but that's not why the garbage is piled so high the residents import garbage from all over the city hundreds and hundreds of tons every year because the industry of Darvey is recycling everything under the Sun is being recycled here plastic glass bottle metal I'll show you some of it cardboard you name it here what do you want to throw away anything you want to throw away they will recycle there's a market for everything this workshop specializes in bottle caps what you doing is the first process of sorting he will take away the light cap and then we use a magnet this scrap metal recycler collects copper wire from plumbers and electricians it's a small family business and recycling links it with the global economy they watch the daily metals index the international prices of liquor and based on that price when he's got enough collected and he thinks the price is right then he will send it to market [Applause] [Music] trash is darvey's lifeblood and recycling is a business that comes naturally to most Indians let me tell you something about Indians we had a very 50 people we don't throw things away not if you know we can get something for it anywhere you go and Mumbai you can see the recyclers of Darvey at work collecting waste and carrying it home so the impulse to throw away that shampoo bottle is simply not there so what do I do I take the shampoo bottle and I put it in a box and I leave it there for the month some guy will come home at the end of the month and take the bottle from me and that's what sets recycling here apart from other places that the market pulls it it pulls the waste into places like this there are thousands upon thousands of one-room recycling factories here these mostly family-run businesses produce very serious 1 billion dollars a year of goods darvey's recyclers have countless ways of turning trash into cash and perhaps their success can be traced back to one very old idea from India's Hindu religion the idea that after death every living thing is reborn the same way the recycling gives new life to trash it can even inspire art are needed connect is a Dutch artist who built this using water bottles we decided to do something with an item that is so commonly available in the West and so commonly here used as a recyclable item he wants to bring attention to Darby's plastic recycling industry which he says is highly sophisticated a simple thing like a water bottle goes through like 15 14 different hands while it enter startup heat till the moment it leaves that if he has a new raw material but most our beings are more interested in recycling plastic than admiring it peri Nath lives and works in this one room tool shack where he makes capsules out of recycled plastic about 6,000 of them a day not far away women and children fill the capsules with a paste made from lives the capsules sell for less than five cents the paste is mixed with chewing tobacco a product that sells all across the country [Music] at the end of this alleyway a family recycles cooking oil cans the cans are reused seven or eight times until they start to rust then they're flattened and sent on their way recycling creates jobs for Darby's poor but it also plays an important role behind the scenes of Mumbai's movie business it's way different from designing for fashion and designing for movies because designing for movies it's more of what you deliver Bollywood makes over a thousand movies a year and generates a huge demand for costumes [Music] [Applause] stylists Muys Kapadia has discovered how recycling clothing can make him very popular with his producers when we're looking for movies a lot of times their budget restrains their budget cuts off it makes more sense that you come to places like this and pick up this stuff which is already used clothing collected from Mumbai households much of a destined for the trash but in the hands of these recyclers it will find a new life the garments are inspected buttons are reattached seams repaired [Music] the fabric has died to bring the colors back to life scrubbed clean stains removed everything pressed and folded like new and ready to be sold off to the ironing it's a to go off in the market anywhere in India bazaars or anywhere it's off the streets and bazaars and it's cheap for everybody these hard workers eat their meals together and some even sleep here too but all over the city the trash keeps on piling up making more work and opportunities for its residents even the pigs who live off the garbage in the streets Mumbai was built on trash today trash feeds an entire economy based on recycling and provides a way of life not just for millions of people but also millions of rats and while many Hindus believe in the sanctity of life even the most holy draw the line at deadly disease Mumbai controls its rat population the old-fashioned way by hunting them down one by one they call themselves the night rat killers Vijay Boyer is a veteran rat killer one of 44 employed by the city wherever there's trash you'll find rats that's for sure Vijay and the rat killers work only after dark we don't wear shoes because they make too much noise we have to move quietly when stalking the rats and that means going barefoot his only weapons are a stick and a flashlight rat killers have a nightly quota of 30 dead rats they're paid 20 cents for each one blood scum if I don't bring in my share of rats I don't get paid and I have to make up for it later altogether the rat hunters count some three hundred and fifty thousand kills a year but even that's not enough the rat population is still on the rise and the city needs dozens more rat killers just to keep up Vijay is one of the most seasoned veterans on the prowl for 15 years and like all the old pros he never touches a rat with his bare hands rats are known to transmit one of the deadliest diseases known to science the bubonic plague or the Black Death the first plague struck Mumbai over a hundred years ago when British Colonials called Mumbai Bombay the city was the jewel of the British Raj its economy based on cotton mills and foreign trade but the Indian laborers had no share in the wealth the worker started living in in these very badly built poorly ventilated tenements which are called Charles eight to tend to a room the tenements were breeding grounds for disease in 1896 a local doctor alerted authorities that he'd been seeing patients who presented symptoms of the bubonic plague carried by the rats that infested the filthy trash ridden workers districts the black death spread quickly [Music] British observers parted Bombay the city of the dead there were so many people are dying thousands died in the overcrowded workers quarters and panic began to spread there was just generals fear that ran through the city and people started leaving in any way they could when the shrinking workforce threatened to [ __ ] the city's economy the British finally took notice the only way in which the British could contain this was take patients to the hospitals and quarantine them as the hospitals began to overflow with the dead and dying city officials put out a call to a pioneer in the emerging science of microbiology dr. Waldemar have keen [Music] working in a makeshift laboratory doctor half keen developed a vaccine in just three months and to prove it was safe dr. have keen administered the first injection to himself his vaccine turned the tide in the Bombay epidemic dr. Hef Keynes compound still stands in the peril neighborhood of Mumbai today the half Keene Institute develops antidotes for poisonous snakes like the king cobra but they also work with the night rat killers every morning they bring in part of their catch to the Institute dr. abate Chaudhary is director of the Institute what we do here is we get the we catch the rats from different Ward's in Mumbai first the animals are checked for germ carrying fleas then dissected [Music] and analyzed their detected algea for the presence of any plague in these rat but that they are infected or not if plague germs are found on the rats it will show up in their livers the rats are the city's early warning system the Institute examines about five percent of the rats caught by the rat killers almost eighteen thousand animals a year the last outbreak of bubonic plague in India was 1994 but the rat killers keep killing to make sure it doesn't happen again Mumbai is the city where trash never dies recycling powers the economy and creates jobs for the urban poor but not every Mumbai trash worker wants to spend all day recycling plastic bottles and old clothes some would rather hunt for gold this is the legendaries a very bizarre mumbai's gold market it's one of the largest gold markets in the world over 16,000 Goldsmith's retailers and street vendors produce trade and sell gold jewelry here for centuries India's volatile currency markets have made gold the safest investment but gold also has great social importance here particularly for wedding gifts Kumar Jain is the vice president of the jewellers Association the country which you have come to is the highest consumer of the gold around the world there's a side to this a very bizarre that most people never see this is one of the hidden workshops where skilled craftsmen turn gold into jewelry these are the Bengali Goldsmith's renowned for their legendary craftsmanship as they work the precious metal a few tiny particles of gold are lost carried out of the workshops and into the streets these little specks of nearly invisible dust settle into every nook and cranny a man of Fontanella calm is a journalist who has written about Mumbai's gold market the gold is everywhere in in this area so it's in the water it's just an on the street and the dirt that's where these people come in there urban prospectors sifting through the city's trash and dirt panning for gold dust they're called gold dust sweepers golden sweeper is a person who he's a street sweeper that's his main job you know he's just sweeping the streets but on top of that he's also retrieving valuable gold dust from the dirt that he's collecting son deal has been a gold sweeper for 10 years he's been doing this since he was 14 years old sometimes he's lucky enough to find a tiny nugget or a speck of gold but most of the particles are microscopic finding the gold dust is like finding a needle in a haystack and it seems like a total impossible search and it seems hopeless but there is a method that they follows much of the gold dust ends up trapped in the clothes of the Goldsmith's when they leave work at the end of the day son deal does his prospecting outside the homes of the Goldsmith's wear open drains empty into the streets this raw sewage is the Klondike for gold sweepers so obviously the material that he's sifting through is is just waste water a lot of waste water contains gold dust just sometimes from the actual bodies of the gold Smith's in the area when they're showering and when they're washing their hands that will go out in into the waste water in the final stage of the process the waste water is mixed with toxic mercury and boiled the tiny particles of gold clumped together into small nuggets it's slow patient painstaking work it's not done in one day we collect waste water for a month then we process the final product a handful of tiny gold nuggets that Sunil can sell back to the jewelers he may well retrieve two to three grams of gold which is which is about $75 worth gold sweepers have been mining the streets and sewers of Mumbai for almost 200 years but another kind of forager also lives off the trash on Mumbai streets the ragpickers they sift through garbage for anything that can be recycled vinod satay is the director of the Acorn Foundation an NGO that works with rag pickers in Mumbai slums work of rag-picking has traditionally been done by lower caste people by the poorest poorest of poor the job of rag-picking is frowned upon by much of Indian society in this society in the Hindu society specially there is a caste system and in that caste system it was always the lowest caste would handle waste rag pickers are the foot soldiers of Mumbai's recycling phenomenon this is the kind of work which people do when they have no other source of income this is an invisible work force Mumbai's trash economy is an equal opportunity employer men and women young and old anyone who can work works even the children [Applause] there is a boy there who is working because he is one of the earning members for his family he could easily be in school and he must be in school thirteen year old Afsar goes to school every day from 7:00 in the morning until 1:00 p.m. he lives here in a one-room rented shack with his mother and seven brothers and sisters [Music] in Metropolis I can't Delta get in Batumi laughs our mother explains that since her husband died the family had to take up rag-picking to make ends meet [Applause] while caring for the children she manages to earn about $12 a month at odd recycling jobs Afsar job involves sorting through piles of trash and separating different types of plastic he taps each piece of plastic on a rock listening for the sound that tells him where it goes the knowledge about each of this plastic is what brings value to this craft and that is his special knowledge which he has learnt at this young age of 13 as to what are the different grades of plastic which comes into the tribe apps are works for a middle man who supplies him with plastic trash and buys everything he sorts and by the time the sack is full by evening after would have earned $3 [Music] vinod Shetty's dream is to help the trash workers of Darvey organize and win the respect and dignity they deserve this entire recycling hub is not the best place to work it's not the best conditions it's it's dirty it's an eye genic their occupational hazards rag pickers have long been ignored by indian society and tolerated by the government but now the city is beginning to look for ways to help them in another part of Mumbai an experiment is underway that could change the lives of rag pickers for the better this is one of mumbai x' 14 new recycling centers rag pickers sell their dry waste here but the best part of this deal is they've cut out the middleman these young men operate the plastic shredding machines I cut up bottles in all sorts of things we can recycle any kind of plastic scrap here the shredded plastic is sold to an industrial recycler sima red car is a mumbai city official your disorder dry waste into paper metal scrap plastic everything is segregated and then sold to the recyclers REM dia gathers trash from three or four apartment buildings he makes 17 cents a kilo for plastic nine cents per paper or aluminum foil altogether he makes about $70 a month to support a wife and three children what else can I do I have children to feed there are no other jobs and I'm not an educated person from Diaz only asset is his bicycle disk Ilya cordially apellido I took out a loan to buy it and at the end of each day I make a payment on the loan [Music] recycling has helped make Mumbai one of the fastest-growing cities in Asia but all these people and all the waste they produce have given the city a nasty case of indigestion and the city sanitation system is in trouble Mumbai's population of 21 million has outgrown its old and crumbling sewer system sewage is leaking into the water supply it's an old problem that goes back to the colonial period when Bombay grew rich from the profits of spices and opium but the merchants had little interest in spending money on sanitation Bombay was really accessible with open sewers open drains sewers you know flushing out onto the surroundings the British built Mumbai's first sewers but only just enough for the ruling classes no one wanted to spend the huge sums to provide sanitation for everyone else it was estimated in the 1860s that Bombay had only 14 miles of sewage lines here compared to London at that time it had 700 miles [Music] the great myth the river became an open sewer once a tidal water way that refreshed the city with its pool of fragrant waters the myth II is now one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world because Mumbai never built a complete sewer system today indoor plumbing is a luxury that only a few can afford in this city of 21 million it's estimated that over five million people don't have access to a toilet their only option is to defecate in public on the beaches by the side of the road on the banks of the mithi River anywhere they can it's a problem that's plagued India for decades [Music] Tushar Gandhi is the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi the father of Indian independence he heads the mahatma gandhi foundation during his lifetime wrote a lot about hygiene and sanitation Gandhi led the nonviolent revolution that forced the British out of India but he also championed a less glamorous struggle to improve India's hygiene which he believed was to blame for disease and pestilence Tushar Gandhi reads from his great-grandfather's writings on sanitation and he said that the laboratories of even the poorest of the poor ought to be as clean and neat as the libraries or kitchens of the of the rich or affluent Gandhi won India's independence but building enough toilets for India's 350 million bottoms was a losing battle the new society has even today 63 years after independence we're really effective useful sanitation facilities are denied to a large part of its population even now after waiting four years for the government to build new sewers some residents are taking matters into their own hands this is called set once a tiny village now a suburb of the ever-expanding Mumbai the village cobbler makes house calls the paperboy delivers the morning newspaper the spice man sells paprika cardamon and tumeric and the milkman cares for his herd much as his ancestors did generations ago but there's one thing the people of coal said do a little differently than their parents in the bad old days residents could only rely on this cramped and filthy facility it was far too small to accommodate cosets growing population so lots of people had to go outside but all that changed when the village in partnership with local NGOs and the municipal government built this new community bathroom there's a cleanliness compared to before it's really beautiful Greta still remembers the old public bathroom the facilities weren't all that good in fact they were much worse in exchange for maintaining the toilets vijay solanki and his wife Hira receive a one-room apartment free utilities than a small salary my wife takes care of the ladies section and I take care of the men's like many occupations in India vijay inherited the job from his late father my father lived here for 50 years he used to clean the old toilet vijay and hera and their families belong to the Dalit caste the so called Untouchables they consider themselves fortunate to have secure jobs and it seems like everyone in the village is happy with their new clean toilets too yeah Nikki thought all the garbage is being cleaned and very good work is being done oh that checkout covered the story of course sets new toilets shows that if you build it they will come and squat [Applause] Mumbai is one of the brightest jewels of Asia working hard to clean up the streets and rivers and provide a toilet for everyone but the best way to get rid of trash is to throw away less and save more and that's what they're doing at the legendary chor Bazar one of the oldest and largest flea markets in India where you can buy almost anything old and new from secondhand clothing to electronics and tires on some days over a hundred thousand visitors stroll through these crowded streets this shop buys repairs and resells horns because in Mumbai anyone brave enough to drive in the traffic needs a good loud horn horns for cars buses trucks and bicycles big horns and small horns of every size and note for every vehicle in a city that loves to honk locals call it the thieves market but no one really knows if for how much of the merchandise is stolen spokesmen have Salwa docma explains if the car is not in use like the parts in Mumbai so they get it over your that you mold it they they break it into scrap and once again they did this older powder called chopped or not the bottom line is the same anything that can be fixed can be recycled and sold over and over again what is the minor mistake and they make it perfect and once again they get back to the market the incredible recyclers of the chore Bazaar are making it almost impossible to throw anything away and they've been doing it for generations they are you're from more than 100 years so their forefathers forefathers forefathers that's going from from your time and now some of Mumbai slipperiest residents are helping to turn the city's food scraps into fertilizer this is one of Mumbai's new composting facilities [Music] three tons of waste from produce markets arrived by truck every day first it's mixed with a cocktail of cow dung and water and left to cook in the hot Sun [Music] next the mixture is moved into cool beds of soil and workers toss in handfuls of ice any effort EDA aka red wiggler earthworms the wiggler's appetite for trash is legendary no small detail because what actually gets sold as fertilizer is the worms manure these worms defecate some of the best nutrient-rich feces known to man it looks and smells exactly like tea powder I borrow this on the Centers 2.6 million worms produced 30 tons of worm when you or a month this is a truly natural product and you can use it for growing anything like vegetables while the recycling worms of Mumbai stuffed themselves with tons of garbage and cow dung some of Mumbai's greenest entrepreneurs are investing in cannibalism machines that eat machines this is the eco shredder and it recycles electronic trash computers printers fax machines BK Soni is the managing director of eco Rico this machine sheds them into smaller pieces to segregate the complicated elements like aluminium steel copper plastic by the time these computer parts hit the conveyer belt they've already been weighed and sorted everything that can't be sold as-is goes up the conveyor belt into the mouth of the shredder into the steel jaws of two heavy-duty blades to gobble up about 1,500 kilograms of machines per hour a magnet separates the plastic from the metals a few employees carefully do the rest sorting out valuable metals like aluminum and copper after the material has been recovered and segregated all the other elements they are being sold to the smelters for reuse chances are recycling machines like this will never go hungry because India produces about 1 million tons of electronic waste every year they're even taking it on the road with a mobile shredder for computer hard drives city officials and companies from India and around the world are always looking for new ways to make money out of trash and this Mumbai company has developed a technology that's almost too good to be true the engineers at sustainable technologies and environmental projects Limited have figured out a way to turn plastic into petroleum tear a gaff under Roy is the company's founder we have been able to come out with a process that actually not only cracks the plastics and various other kind of waste materials but also convert that into hydrocarbon fuels Roy causes machine the poly cracker it's a high-tech solution for the 400 tonnes of plastic waste the city produces every day that can be further modified to provide us with the diesel gasoline and kerosene first the plastic trash is melted down and converted into a gas the gas is run over a catalyst that breaks down the large molecules into smaller ones which are condensed into gasoline and other fuels and there's another benefit the entire process creates enough energy to power itself but that's not all the Polly cracker can turn almost any kind of trash not just plastic into fuel we all started including the rubber wastes rubber trouble perhaps then various other wastes but rau isn't satisfied with that he has even more ambitious recycling plans he wants to recycle something fundamental to daily life water we have started consuming more and more water but we are not recycling the water for reuse he starts with something Mumbai has a lot of sewage he adds a mixture of natural clays and an oxygen compound within seconds the toxic bacteria are dying out and the sediments have sunk to the bottom [Music] a simple filter removes the sediment the recycled water isn't potable without further treatment but it has many household uses even though we do not recommend it for a gritty we can still use it for various other purposes like gardening borrowing the lawns you can use it for washing the floors washing your automobiles raus invention could reduce domestic water consumption by 70% from the gold sweepers of moombas gutters and alleys to the magic of India's brightest entrepreneurs the city embodies the Hindu faith in reincarnation that is fast becoming the recycling capital of the world but there's one thing in Mumbai that's in chronically short supply and which can't be recycled land the result a shortage of office space is driving Mumbai's property prices as high as Manhattans what we see behind us is the most expensive pieces of real estate surrounding Mumbai real estate speculators and developers are targeting the heart of Mumbai's recycling miracle the neighborhood called Darvey Darvey is a stone's throw from mumbai most expensive business district the Bandra Kurla complex headquarters for many of the city's top corporations the land occupied by the tool shops and homes of the working poor of dha'fi is a gold mine and the developers are pressuring the city to relocate the people and recycle the neighbourhood about 75 years for the people to fill up this land build their Township build the houses and now the real estate developers want this piece of land if developers have their way Darby's slum dwellers will be replaced by shopping malls office buildings and condominiums many of the current residents would be given free apartments and new high-rises but there would be no room for workshops and factories the city doesn't care as to who recycles their waste as long as it's being done but the residents of Darvey have drawn a line in the trash they've lobbied hard against the plan and even managed to stall the project but it is once again moving forward in another part of Mumbai the desperate hunger for land and the crushing burden of the city's trash has led to a greener outcome here is proof that in India almost anything can be reborn this is the form of Gorai dump one of whom buys four giant trash dumps this was one of whom buys most toxic landfills but now it's undergone a nearly miraculous transformation the Gorai renovation has helped regenerate Mumbai 'he's threatened mangroves methane generated by trash rotting underground is captured and burned off burning the city millions of dollars through an international carbon credit plan it's all in keeping with the Mumbai credo that where there's trash there's money to be made and that thanks to the genius of its engineers and entrepreneurs the energy of its rag pickers and recyclers both rich and poor [Music] in Mumbai almost any dream no matter how green can come true [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: hazards and catastrophes

Views: 1,377,583

Rating: 4.61518 out of 5

Keywords: Trashopolis full documentaries, Trashopolis documentary, Trashopolis earth documentary, Trashopolis Mumbai, Trashopolis The Eternal City, Trashopolis Mumbai India, Trashopolis India, Trashopolis, Trashopolis Documentary, Trashopolis Full Episode, Trashopolis Season 2, Trashopolis Mumbai Documentary, Trashopolis Mumbai History, Trashopolis Mumbai Trash Documentary, Trashopolis Clean Mumbai, Trash Documentary, Trashopolis Getting Rid of Trash, Trashopolis Indian Culture

Id: bJ2NzpG_gQ8

Length: 45min 50sec (2750 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

"Let me tell you something Indians are very thrifty people, they don't throw things away" * says while garbage piled 10ft high serves as a backdrop, haha