Credit V:S Carbon Credit

Credit V:S Carbon Credit

Santu and Aasma Bibi are Delhi based recyclers. Both of them are also activists with Safai Sena, an association of wastepickers, itinerant buyers and small waste dealers. Both are acutely aware of how waste recyclers’ livelihoods are being endangered as the government privatizes waste management. Asma Bibi is worried how a waste-to-energy project in her own backyard, in the Ghazipur landfill in Delhi, may put wastepickers like herself out of a job. Santu, pushed out of his small shop in Connaught Place by a large corporate, put forward the case of recyclers at the CDM board in Copenhagen, in 2009. Both of them know that many waste related projects would be unviable without carbon credits, but that these carbon credits also result in projects that throw out wastepickers and other recyclers from their work. They also know that wastepickers and other recyclers save a lot of green house gases from their own work. But is this their experience alone or that of other waste recyclers too?
The two decide to explore the effects of such projects on recyclers like them. They travel from Delhi to Kanpur and Mumbai to explore what impact the hunger for carbon credits and private handling of waste has had on recyclers like themselves.