Recycling, Dhaka Style

Trash sifters work on their haunches, knees in the air, arms reaching between thighs, hands digging through paper, broken glass, egg shells, bones, coffee grounds … all the leavings of an urban society. They work quickly, discards scooped sideways through tented legs to be loaded back on garbage trucks, the occasional find grabbed by boys who run recovered objects to a sale table.

It’s nothing, just a plank precariously balanced on bits of a wall. But it has the advantage of sprawling around a sidewalk corner, a place where the street turns in on itself to avoid the grounds of a Dhaka museum, one known as the Pink Palace. Here you can buy a cracked pitcher, a cordless toaster, a spoon, a stained shirt with no buttons, almost anything for one or two takas or two to three cents American. By contrast, in the nearby commerce of a bazaar's warren-like passageways, the same item cleaned up would cost … maybe … twenty takas.

While I watch, an escaped sheet of newsprint spreads its wings and floats up to lodge in a tree's branches. Bits of greasy trash bags and pieces of wrapping paper (no plastic bags in Bangladesh) are lodged in gutters and against scaffolding, wedged into tree roots, and becoming mush under the wheels of tuk tuks and busses. Refuse filters away from this center, announcing its presence for blocks around.

Here is the sub-basement of private enterprise, existing below sweat shops and poverty-level commerce. This is recycling, Dhaka style.