Like Hindu souls, disposable plastic cups are many times reborn in Dha-ravi. In a spiralling continuum, they are discarded and gathered in, melted down to their polypropylene essence, and remoulded in some new plastic form. Recycling is one of the slum's biggest industries. Thousands of tonnes of scrap plastic, metals, paper, cotton, soap and glass revolve through Dharavi each day. Location is the key to this. Until two decades ago, the slum was next door to Bombay's biggest rubbish tip. This provided a livelihood for thousands of local dalits, for whom "ragpicking"-scaveng-ing on society's leftovers for anything of salvageable value-is a traditional employment. The tip has since been shifted outside the city. So too, for want of space, have many of Dharavi's recycling units. Yet the roughly 6,000 tonnes of rubbish produced each day by a swelling Mumbai continues to sustain an estimated 30,000 ragpickers, including many residents of Dharavi. The slum is also host to some 400 recycling units.
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