Recycling

Ragpicker

A person who collects and sells rags.

‘His father still works as a ragpicker, pushing his handcart around the city streets, collecting scraps of discarded cloth that he sells to a contractor.’

Oxford Dictionary
More example sentences

‘Labourers, ragpickers in the mornings or film poster affixers during the night are the worst hit, not to forget children who are drawn to them and two-wheeler riders.’
‘He began to work as a ragpicker and lived in the railway station.’
‘More often, contemporaries described such youths by their street occupation or activity: newsboys, copper pickers, wood-stealers, ragpickers, swill-gatherers, bootblacks.’
‘The Tapias are ragpickers who earn a living from a nearby municipal dump.’

1 What Really Happens To Our Recycled Clothes? | Unravel | Real Stories Indie Doc

 

26 nov. 2019

‘Unravel’ follows the West’s second-hand clothes on a journey across India, from the sea to sleepy, industrial Panipat, – one of the only places in the world that recycles textiles at scale. 
 
Reshma sorts cast-offs in a textile recycling factory in India, and dreams of travelling the vast distances the clothes she handles have. While Reshma shows us how these garments are transformed, she and other workers reflect on these clothes, disconnected from their source, constructing an intriguing picture of the West from both rumour and imagination.

2 Where Your Old Clothes Go to Get a New Life: India

 
 

28 jun. 2016

A deluge of secondhand clothing from the U.S. and other wealthy countries arrives each month in the port of Kandla in western India to be resold in the developing world. Photo: Alisson Joyce for The Wall Street Journal

3 How Sacred Flowers Are Turned Into Incense Sticks | World Wide Waste

 
 

13 feb. 2021

Millions of Hindu worshippers start every day with a ritual offering of flowers. Temples dump those flowers into the Ganges, adding harmful chemicals and pesticides to a river that’s a lifeline for over 400 million people. Phool, an Indian startup, collects the discarded flowers and transforms them into handmade incense sticks.

4 The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan’s Poorest

 
 

11 jul. 2016

The E-Waste Curse: The deadly effect of dumping E-waste in Pakistan Pakistan has become an illegal dumping ground for some of the 50 million tons of e-waste created each year. Karachi’s poor earn a living from the toxic detritus, but the vicious cycle of consumption could prove fatal. 
 
In Pakistan, the massive arrival of electronic waste has created an informal substance economy that feeds 150,000 people. The country’s poor salvage what they can from the cast-offs of the electronic revolution: copper, steel, brass. Nassir is one who has cashed in on the opportunities found in old cables and hard-drives. “It’s a good business. I have more and more work”, he says. Yet workers pay the price for a few grams of copper; 4 million people die every year because of electronic waste and recycling workers have the lowest life expectancy in Pakistan. In his recycling shop, Akhbar earns 2€ on a good day. It feeds his family of six, but his health has suffered. “This job is dangerous. It’s very toxic”. And the toxic legacy is far-reaching – “It’s a catastrophe…especially for the children”, warns Saba, an activist for the WWF. “They will continue to live here and be poisoned, it’s dangerous for them and it’s dangerous for the next generations”. In our relentlessly consumerist world, can the global poor be saved from the toxic trade in e-waste?
 
Wild Angle Productions – Ref. 6832
 
Journeyman Pictures is your independent source for the world’s most powerful films, exploring the burning issues of today. We represent stories from the world’s top producers, with brand new content coming in all the time. On our channel you’ll find outstanding and controversial journalism covering any global subject you can imagine wanting to know about.

5 Recycling In India

 

20 mei 2013

A documentary film about the traditional ways of recycling in India.
Winner – Best Documentary Short, Tenerife International Film Festival 2011
Official Selection – Radar Hamburg International Film Festival 2011

6 India Has a Booming Recycling Industry

 

12 jul. 2016

Recycling The Poor (2010): Despite the benefits of recycling, prejudices against ‘informal-pickers’ in India are yet to be overcome.
 

Imagine streets with no dustbins. Imagine a place where everybody litters wherever they want. Against this chaotic backdrop, India has the highest recycling levels in the world.

India’s ‘informal recycling’ industry has become an important business sector in its own right. Ramshackle sacks of general scrap are piled up in every corner while a group of women busily sort plastic by type and colour. Most of their income is earned laboriously salvaging any recyclables they can sell on. Despite the benefits of recycling, prejudices against ‘informal-pickers’ are yet to be overcome. But very few places in the world have organised as sophisticated and successful a network of ‘recycling cooperatives’. They keep the place clean and provide employment for the poorest.

Shoreditch Films Ltd – Ref. 4883

Journeyman Pictures is your independent source for the world’s most powerful films, exploring the burning issues of today. We represent stories from the world’s top producers, with brand new content coming in all the time. On our channel you’ll find outstanding and controversial journalism covering any global subject you can imagine wanting to know about.

7 Recycling revolutionary shows how you can turn old clothes into kitchen tiles | Australian Story

 
 

22 feb. 2021

Scientist Veena Sahajwalla is a recycling superstar with some bold new ideas about how to save waste from landfill.

As Australia’s collective garbage guilt builds alongside the tonnes of plastic piling up in recycling depots, her innovative inventions may offer some exciting new solutions.

Inspired walking the streets of her Mumbai neighbourhood as a child, Veena observed almost everything was reused and “nothing was wasted”.

This can-do attitude shaped her engineering career and sowed the seeds for some ground-breaking ideas, including making steel from car tyres.

Now she’s unveiling her latest invention, a “micro factory” that creates building materials and tiles from dumped clothes and glass.

It’s a revolutionary concept. But will it work outside the lab?

#VeenaSahajwalla #AustralianStory #GreenSteel #GreenCeramics
Read more: https://ab.co/37iHi06
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About Australian Story: Putting the “real” back into reality television, Australian Story is an award-winning documentary series with no narrator and no agendas — just authentic stories told entirely in people’s own words. Take 30 minutes to immerse yourself in the life of an extraordinary Australian. They’re sometimes high profile, sometimes controversial, but always compelling. It’s television guaranteed to make you think and feel. New episodes are available every Monday.

8 The dirty business with old clothes

 
 

14 aug. 2019

Most people believe, that old clothes donations collected by various organisations are immediately sent to countries in need. What they don’t know is, the majority of the donated clothing is sold per kilogramme. Some aid organisations merely place their logo on the collection containers of used clothes firms. 
 
A small amount of the clothing is given to the needy in the country of origin. The better, still useful items are sent to Eastern Europe and the Arab states. 60% of the articles are sent to Africa. But just what happens to the used items there? Michael Höft and Christian Jentzsch travelled to Tanzania in search of answers. Their conclusion: Not only German companies and several major aid organisations earn well from the donations; for many traders in Africa, old clothes donations are a lucrative business model. Even the poorest of the poor have to pay at least something for them. The cheap clothes flood the markets of the respective countries and bring the African textile industry to its knees.

9 Scientist Resurrects Dead Chicken

 
 

22 apr. 2020

We don’t want to speak out of turn, but this might be the world’s greatest scientific breakthrough.
 
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