In Bhopal’s Idgah Hills, Who is Segregating Our Plastic Waste?

On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, little stirs outside Bhopal’s famous TB Hospital—until you notice the blue-and-white shed tucked just beyond its gates. Municipal garbage trucks sit in neat lines, returned from their rounds collecting waste through old Bhopal. 

On the other side, inside the compound, a tin-roofed hall buzzes back to life as the lunch break ends. Outside the hall, two women flick tin cans and plastic wrappers into separate piles. The iron mesh divides the adjacent hall into square compartments, every cubicle labeled — metal, plastic, rubber, aluminum, etc.

This is the Idgah Hills Material Recovery Facility (MRF), a joint effort of the Municipal Corporation and the nonprofit Sarthak (Hindi word for significant). Guiding us through the waste is 45-year-old Mala Nimbalkar, who now runs the center.

“People used to call us binnewala (a derogatory term for waterpickers in Hindi),” she says, “now… they call us ‘Madam.’

The waste is segregated into sixteen designated categories, including plastic, before any of it moves on to recycling plants. Nimbalkar keeps a log of every kilogram of waste that enters and exits the facility. Her day starts at ten a.m. and runs till evening.

A mother of three children, she grew up on a farm in Nandura, Maharashtra. While in tenth grade, she married Sanjay Nimbalkar and moved to Bhopal. With limited financial means, she worked as a housemaid, earning just ₹200–300 a month. The constant worry of making ends meet weighed heavily on her.

She soon noticed that other waste pickers were earning ₹200–300 a day—what she made in an entire month. By 2005, she had joined her husband, Sanjay, at the Bhanpur landfill, about 30 minutes from Idgah Hills. Their day began at 4 a.m.; by six, they were sorting through trash, chasing weight over quality, stuffing their sacks with any plastic or metal that could fetch a price. Gradually, she began working alongside them and, little by little, learned the trade herself.

Plastic is found in abundance in the waste and pays relatively well in the market, Sanjay explained. That logic stands, as India produces 9.3 million tons of plastic annually; 5.6 million tons are recycled, but 3.8 million go uncollected. 

Within Bhopal’s 35 municipal wards, daily plastic waste already tops 69.59 tons and could reach 76.69 tons by 2030. Fifteen transfer stations funnel the city’s trash, yet only six MRFs perform the painstaking separation of like the one at Idgah Hills.  Eight licensed recyclers manage just 7.5 tons a day—barely a tenth of what the city discards.

But how important is the work of segregation, particularly plastic segregation, that Mala oversees? In a nutshell, without strict sorting, mixed plastics melt poorly, contaminate each other with additives, clog machines, release toxic fumes, and often end up in landfills or fires.

To explain this in a bit more detail: mixed plastic waste contains different materials, each with its own chemical properties. When these plastics are melted together, some types may react badly with others, break down, or weaken the final recycled product. This lowers the quality of the recycled plastic and reduces how much material recyclers can recover. As a result, recycling becomes more expensive and less useful. This is one part of the problem.

 The other part is that the different plastics contain various additives like flame retardants or dyes. When mixed, these chemicals can contaminate the recycled plastic. This makes it unsafe for sensitive uses, such as food packaging or medical products. In many cases, the contamination is so high that the material becomes useless and ends up in a landfill or incinerator.

Because of these challenges, many recycling centers reject mixed plastic waste. It often ends up in landfills or is burned. Both options waste resources and pollute the environment.

Still, across Madhya Pradesh, only 360 MRFs serve 406 urban local bodies, and just seven (one rural) sit in Bhopal, significantly less than what is necessary.

In Mala’s MRF, the plastic waste is segregated into seven categories. Rates here beat street prices: rubber tubes fetch ₹3 a kilo, glass bottles ₹4, mixed plastic ₹25, cardboard ₹12—and some sorted plastics command ₹300–350. Whatever can’t be recycled becomes feedstock for cement or roads, never a garbage fire.

In 2007, Mala and Sanjay joined Sarthak. Founder Imtiyaz Ali guided them to see different plastic resins. Ali said that his goal is to prevent plastic from being burned or ending up in landfills. 

And, just 44 minutes away from MRF, which Mala supervises, is Adampur Khanti, a designated dumping site for Bhopal’s waste. At 1 pm on 22 April this year, the garbage caught fire. The smoke could be seen from 10 km away. The residents in the nearby villages faced the effects of improper waste management, with severe burning sensations in the eyes and difficulty in breathing.

There are several such fire incidents on the site, and on 16 May this year, a bench of Justice Abhay Oka of the Supreme Court ordered an investigation into these incidents and medical checkups of the local people. This is what Ali wants to save people from. He aims to find local solutions to segregate waste and save his city and nearby villages from an avoidable public health crisis.

By 2018, Sarthak had launched a network of MRFs; Idgah Hills became Mala’s domain, while Sanjay oversaw operations city-wide. Ten employees—four of them women—now work under her leadership, each receiving medical checkups every three months.

The job transformed the family. One daughter finished ITI (Industrial Training Institute) and a nursing course, their one son studies in Class 12, and another is an engineer. 

Raju Ramcharan Nimbalkar grew up watching his parents work as waste pickers. He was just 13 when he began helping them in the same line of work. But in 2018, his path shifted when he joined Sarthak and began working in waste segregation at the MRF.

Reflecting on the difference between his parents' life and his own, he says,

“My family always picked garbage in sacks… there was nothing else in that life but trash. Now, I can provide whatever my children ask for. They’re able to study well. If a center like this had existed in my parents’ time, I might have studied too.”

Yet, old prejudices persist. “My relatives still think we handle filth,” he says. “They don’t see that clean streets and unclogged drains depend on this work.”

Almost 5000 individuals are associated with Sarthak. Apart from employment, the organization helps the family to enroll their children in government schools. Countless other Malas wait for their chance at dignity—and for more sheds like this one to rise beyond the TB Hospital’s quiet walls.

Note: We have contacted the officials from the local urban bodies for comments on the state of plastic pollution—we will update the story when we receive the comments.

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