Is that a biscuit wrapper you’re breathing?

On paper, Pakistan is a recycling success story. On plastic, not so much. Bad puns aside, the World Bank has said we beat all of South Asia with the lowest marine plastic pollution rates. Those in the business will tell you Pakistan is flipping trash so well that it now imports used gallon milk jugs from Ohio, and may teach Saudi Arabia how to turn it into street pavers. Why bother with cloth bags and paper straws if we are already recycling kings? Because of biscuit and chips packet wrappers and the question of what happens to them. And what I discovered in Shershah.

Karachi’s Shershah market is a byword for recycling, but over the years, fussy power supplies have hemmed business into a corner of the neighbourhood called Paracha, named after a textile mill. What I saw at these small setups here is the part of Pakistan’s success story that no recycler brings up.

You know how it works. Labourers sort household trash by colour, discard what can’t be recycled, and feed the rest into a crusher. A black oozing sausage emerges from what looks like the meat-mincing machine and is fed through another that shapes it into long, thin strips. The strips are cooled in metal tanks filled with water and then cut into one-millimetre pellets, or dana. That dana is used to make new plastic babies. And the cycle continues.

One unit at Paracha was producing green dana or pellets; another three doors down was turning out cleaner ones from unused medical waste. But dana wasn’t the only end-product, I realised. “What’s that on the floor?” I asked the men. I was pointing to coal-like blobs. That’s gatha, they said. Factories and kilns buy it as........

© Dawn Prism