One video I’m not so sure I’d like Indian policy makers to see

Mike Biddle, here espousing a highly mechanized, technology heavy solution to recycling plastics uses all of one line to summarily dismiss any of the work that waste pickers and small-scale recyclers do. Clearly, he’s not spent much time around waste workers in India, probably he landed in Mumbai, spent an afternoon in Dharavi and then returned to his plush hotel in downtown. Of course, independent waste recyclers doesn’t quite jive if you want to be selling large-scale recycling plants to governments like India’s or China…

3 thoughts on “One video I’m not so sure I’d like Indian policy makers to see

  1. Yeah I was thinking too: how such machines/factories are completely non labour intensive and therefore not really good for the Indian context at all.

  2. Yes, and probably that type of technology is expensive to purchase, install, maintain and manage. Will create a dependency on foreign skill sets which might be hard to keep up. I really wonder what kind of data or information he’s using to say that the indian waste pickers/recyclers aren’t actually recycling much? I’ve seen myself small-scale plastics recyclers using the output of those kind of sorting operations…

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