Garbage cafes are springing up across India. The BBC visits the city of Ambikapur to find out how much impact they can really have on plastic – and people.

As I approach India's first Garbage Cafe on a cloudy and foggy winter day in early 2025, the smell of hot samosas immediately makes the place feel cosy. Inside, people are sitting on wooden benches holding steel plates filled with steaming meals, some chatting, others eating quietly.

Every day, hungry people arrive at this cafe in Ambikapur, a city in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, in the hope of getting a hot meal. But they don't pay for their food with money – instead, they hand over bundles of plastic such as old carrier bags, food wrappers and water bottles.

People can trade a kilogram (2.2lb) of plastic waste for a full meal that includes rice, two vegetable curries, dal, roti, salad and pickles, says Vinod Kumar Patel, who runs the cafe on behalf of the Ambikapur Municipal Corporation (AMC), the public body which manages the city's infrastructure and services. "For half a kilogram of plastic, they get breakfast like samosas or vada pav."

Ambikapur, a city in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, has tried to use the scourge of plastic pollution to address hunger. It launched the Garbage Cafe in 2019, using the slogan "more the waste, better the taste". Funded through AMC's sanitation budget, it was set up near the city's main bus stand.

"The idea for the need to tackle two existing problems in Ambikapur: plastic waste and hunger," Patel says. The idea was simple: to encourage low-income people, especially the homeless and ragpickers (those who collect rags and waste for a living), to collect plastic waste from streets and landfills, and give them hot meals in return.

Rashmi Mondal is a local woman who brings plastic to the cafe. Every morning, she sets out early on the streets of Ambikapur in a search for discarded plastic – anything from old food wrappers to plastic bottles. For her, collecting such detritus is a means of survival.

"I've been doing this work for years," Mondal says, looking at the small pile of plastic she has gathered. Previously, Mondal used to sell the plastic she collected to local scrap dealers for just 10 Indian rupees (£0.09/$0.12) per kilogram – barely enough to survive on. "But now, I can get food for my family in exchange for the plastic I collect. It makes all the difference in our lives."

Many people who arrive at the cafe come from underprivileged backgrounds, says Sharada Singh Patel, who has worked at the cafe since its inception. "If food is available in place of plastic, we're not only helping to fill empty stomachs but also contributing to cleaning up the environment." On average, according to Vinod Patel, the cafe feeds more than 20 people per day.

The cafe has also had an impact on the amount of plastic waste going to landfill, says Ritesh Saini, who coordinates sanitation and waste management in the city for Swachh Bharat Mission Urban, a cleanliness and sanitation initiative launched by the Indian government in 2014. It has collected almost 23 tonnes of plastic in total since 2019, he says, contributing to a wider fall in the plastic going to landfill in the city from 5.4 tonnes per year in 2019 to two tonnes per year in 2024.

It's a small proportion of Ambikapur's overall plastic waste, which sat at 226 tonnes in 2024, almost all of which is already recycled, according to Saini. But the cafe aims to collect plastic that slips through the main collection network, he says, as well as to encourage public participation. It sits alongside a wider push in the city to reduce and recycle plastic waste, including stricter rules on plastic use and better ways of sorting and managing waste, he says.

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