Aside from haute couture women's handbags, the project, being driven by the Conserve non-governmental environmental group, is churning out file folders, shoe-racks, storage boxes, table mats and coasters.

"It's effective waste management while providing a section of the urban poor with a means of livelihood," said Anita Ahuja, one of the brains behind Conserve.

Launched in 1988, the NGO focused on projects such as recycling household waste into compost before moving into recycling plastics about two years ago.

The recycling process begins with rag pickers, who collect plastic bags from the 600 tonnes of waste produced daily by Delhi's 14 million population.

"Of this 20 to 25 percent waste is plastic," said Ahuja's husband Shalabh, her partner at Conserve.

The first challenge is finding enough people willing to collect the raw material.

"Rag-pickers don't find it worth their while to pick up the 600 to 800 bags which make a kilogram (2.2 pounds) and which fetches them about two rupees (four cents). This makes our job particularly difficult," Ahuja said.

When enough bags have been collected, they have to be cleaned -- again a difficult task as people use bags to dispose of all kinds of obnoxious items, she said.

The bags are then sorted according to their colours, prints and thicknesses.

The next step is feeding them into a machine which fuses them into colourful plastic sheets of varying thicknesses. Conserve has about 10-12 such machines and is in the process of securing a patent for them from the Indian government.

The sheets are made into the various products, the most popular of which are file covers, said Anita Ahuja.

The products are mostly designed by foreign volunteers, led by Russian freelance designer Ekaterina Lopoukhina.

The project was started with a capital of about 1.8 million rupeesdollars) and Conserve has recouped about 200,000 rupees or (4,440 dollars) since it began marketing its products six months ago.

Sales, however, are a bit of a problem.

"We Indians do not take to new things immediately," Ahuja said, adding the recycled goods were a bigger draw abroad than at home.

"Indians express surprise to scepticism when they see the products," she said. Surprise at the fact that plastic can be recycled and scepticism about how hygienic the products are.

"Foreigners meanwhile go 'Wow!' We get a better response from them than from our own people," she said.

Shalabh Ahuja said several international chains had shown interest in the products, while Swedish lifestyle products retailer Ikea had asked for 500,000 handbags, "which we just don't have the manpower to deliver."

The folders are priced between 50 rupees and 400 rupees (one dollar to eight dollars) while the handbags fetch up to 2,000 rupees (44 dollars) -- steep prices for India.

The money goes into a cooperative of about 60 people, mostly women living in New Delhi's shantytowns.

"The women are the ones who wash and clean the bags and make them into folders and other things. We pay them about 2,000 rupees (44 dollars) a month for their work," said Anita.

One of the employees, Geeta Pande, said she was happy with her work.

"There are other women in the neighbourhood who have come to me saying that they would like to do this work," said Pande, who works from her home in a shantytown situated along Delhi's border with neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state.

She washes the bags in her house and dries them on her roof.

Besides being a source of income, Pande said her work was slowly creating awareness about pollution caused by polythene bags in her neighbourhood.

For Anita Ahuja, there's no alternative to recycling plastic bags.

"Banning plastics won't work as there is no substitute for this. Paper bags cannot withstand weight or moisture. Cloth bags get dirty very soon and cannot withstand moisture.

"Recycling is the only option," she said.

TERRA.WIRE