Raddi and the Raddi-Wala: India’s Quiet Circular Economy (and Why It Matters)

Walk any street in an Indian city and you’ll eventually hear it, a tinny chant, the clatter of a bicycle cart, a call that promises to turn the discarded into cash: “Kabadi! Kabadi!” Behind that sound is a hidden economy that threads through neighborhoods, markets, trains and landfills.

The people who answer that call, raddi-walas, kabadiwalas, ragpickers, informal waste collectors, are the frontline custodians of India’s informal recycling system. Their labour is messy, underpaid and often invisible, but it keeps materials flowing back into markets, reduces landfill loads, and delivers a real, measurable climate benefit. This article maps the cultural roots of the raddi trade, its scale, its environmental impact, the human realities behind the work, and why policy and public recognition must finally catch up.

A practice with deep roots

Collecting and re-selling “what others throw away” is hardly new. Rag-picking, scrap dealing and informal reclaiming of materials trace back centuries and intensified with industrialization, when urban centers and factories created markets for rags, metals and other secondary materials. In India the figure of the kabadiwala is part of the urban soundscape: a person who visits neighborhoods, buys paper, bottles and metal, and feeds local cottage-level recycling chains and formal recyclers alike. That cultural familiarity, a household saving “raddi” for the kabadiwala, reflects an age-old economy of reuse that pre-dates modern waste-management bureaucracies.

Scale: how big is the raddi economy?

Estimates vary, partly because ragpicking is informal and often unrecorded, but the scale is large enough that ignoring it would cripple any serious recycling effort.

• India generates on the order of ~160,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day (the Central Pollution Control Board’s reporting around 2020–22 shows roughly this magnitude and highlights that a significant share of that waste remains unaccounted or improperly processed).

• The number of people engaged in informal waste collection in India is commonly quoted in the millions. Different studies give different figures, some estimates put it around ~4 million informal waste workers in India, while global estimates (ILO/WIEGO) place the worldwide number of informal waste pickers in the tens of millions. Whatever the exact count, the takeaway is clear: this is a mass-scale livelihood and a mass-scale recycling workforce.

Because the system is decentralized, the same materials pass through many hands, from household to kabadiwala to broker to recycler, and that informal chain is responsible for diverting substantial volumes of recyclable material away from dumps and burning.

What raddi-walas do for recycling, sustainability and climate action

You can think of the raddi economy as a distributed, low-tech circular economy operating on the margins of the formal system. Its environmental benefits are concrete:

• Huge diversion of plastics and recyclables. Several analyses estimate that informal collectors divert a very large share of recoverable plastics and other recyclables from landfill or open burning, figures like “around 50–60% of plastics” diverted via informal channels are cited in sector studies. That means less litter, less burning, and fewer plastics entering rivers and oceans.

• Carbon and greenhouse-gas (GHG) savings. By reclaiming materials that would otherwise be buried or burned, waste pickers prevent decomposition and open burning emissions and displace the need to produce virgin materials (which is energy-intensive). Local studies have produced striking numbers: for example, waste-picker systems in Ahmedabad have been estimated to prevent roughly 200,000 tonnes CO₂-equivalent per year, equivalent, the study notes, to removing over 100,000 cars from the road. New tools (including GHG calculators designed for waste-picker activity) quantify multiple pathways through which waste pickers avoid emissions.

• Material recovery at low cost. Because the raddi network collects and pre-sorts dry recyclables door-to-door or at the curb, municipalities can reduce collection burdens and avoid costly centralized processing and transport. Informal recovery also feeds recycling industries (paper, PET, metals) that rely on steady supplies of sorted secondary materials.

Taken together, these contributions make raddi-walas not just informal laborers but de-facto climate actors and urban environmental managers.

The data is messy — and sometimes contested

Quantifying exactly how much material informal collectors handle or how much GHG they avoid is complicated. Different data sources give different recycling-rate estimates for India’s plastics and other waste streams. For plastics, some industry or government summaries have historically cited large national recycling rates, while more conservative, state-based analyses (and independent audits) suggest lower national averages, and that the true picture varies massively by state and material type. In short: India’s informal sector achieves impressive material recovery in many places, but headline recycling numbers can mask deep regional disparities and data gaps.

The human story: dignity, danger, and gender

The environmental benefits sit alongside human costs. Ragpicking is physically demanding, often hazardous work, exposure to sharp objects, toxic e-waste, open fires at dump sites, and respiratory risks from burning. Children are tragically involved in some contexts, and many workers lack formal recognition, identity documents, social security or health coverage. Women are a large and essential component of many reclaiming chains (for instance, organised cooperatives in Pune are predominantly women), yet stigma and precarity persist. Photographers, NGOs and media reports have repeatedly documented these hardships while also showing how worker organization and integration can improve safety and incomes.

Success stories: formalizing what already works

The most promising approaches don’t replace raddi-walas — they recognize and strengthen them. Two kinds of examples illustrate the point:

• Worker cooperatives and PPPs. The Pune SWACH model (a pro-poor public-private partnership built on a waste-pickers’ union cooperative) has institutionalized doorstep collection, improved incomes and diverted hundreds of tonnes of waste daily, and advocates say it has delivered substantial emissions reductions as a result. Such models reveal how organizing can convert informal know-how into scalable, dignified services.

• Local impact studies. City-level research (Ahmedabad, Pune and others) has quantified both the environmental contribution of informal collectors and the cost-effectiveness of inclusion compared with capital-intensive alternatives. These studies make a strong case: formal waste plans that ignore the informal sector risk losing the environmental and social value it generates.

  
  

Policy: rules exist, implementation lags

India’s 2016 Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules explicitly call for identification and inclusion of waste pickers in municipal systems, identity cards, training and integration are all mentioned, but on-the-ground implementation has been uneven. Surveys and monitoring reports show many urban local bodies still struggle to register and integrate informal workers, leaving livelihoods insecure and the environmental benefits under-leveraged. Better data, formal recognition, support for cooperatives, and procurement of services from organized waste-picker groups would be pragmatic next steps.

Why India’s culture of raddi matters beyond nostalgia

This isn’t about romanticising poverty. It’s about recognising a living institutional memory of reuse and material stewardship embedded in Indian daily life. The “raddi culture”, saving newspapers, glass, small metal bits, plastic bottles, spreads an informal ethic of reuse that formal campaigns often struggle to generate from scratch. Where policy and markets nurture that ethic (through buyback schemes, formalization, safer working conditions and reasonable prices for secondary materials), the result is a more circular city: less leakage of material into water bodies, fewer open-burning events, and lower GHG emissions.

The straight talk: what needs to be done

If we want the environmental benefits of this ecosystem to scale without continuing to offload social and health costs onto vulnerable workers, we need a multi-pronged approach:

1. Recognition and registration. Municipalities should map, register and issue IDs to informal collectors so they can access benefits and participate in formal contracts. (The SWM Rules already require this; follow-through is the problem.)

2. Support organization. Encourage cooperatives and unions (as in Pune) so workers gain bargaining power, training, protective gear and formal incomes.

3. Data and valuation. Municipal accounting should recognize the environmental service value of informal collection (for instance, carbon avoided, landfill space saved) so budgets and contracts reflect true savings. Tools developed by WIEGO and research groups help quantify these values.

4. Safe formal pathways for hazardous waste. E-waste and medical waste require different handling; training and clear procurement channels can shield waste pickers from the worst hazards while preserving their role in material recovery.

   
   

Conclusion: public recognition for private labor that benefits us all

Raddi-walas are more than a quirky face of Indian streets. They are laborers, small-scale entrepreneurs, climate defenders and custodians of a material culture of reuse that cities desperately need. Integrating their knowledge, protecting their rights, and compensating their climate service would be an elegant, ethical win: less waste in rivers and skies, more circular material flows, and tens of thousands of people lifted into safer, more secure livelihoods.

We often talk about "community behavior change" for recycling. But India already has a behaviour embedded in practice, the raddi economy. What we lack is the political will and administrative imagination to turn that cultural asset into a formal pillar of sustainable urbanism. Recognize it. Respect it. Invest in it. The planet, and the people who keep our streets clean, will be better for it.

{Key sources and further reading: WIEGO statistical briefs and tools on waste pickers; Central Pollution Control Board MSW annual reports (2020–22); India Plastics Pact reports and independent analyses on plastics recycling rates; city-level studies from Ahmedabad and Pune on emissions avoided and cooperative models; reporting from The Guardian/NDTV/AP on on-the-ground worker realities.}

A Raddi-wala