"This is a very tiring job. Sometimes I cut my hands while sifting through the trash," he said when the Star City correspondent asked him how he could stand on the pile of garbage for hours together. "I do not want to work here. Please do something for me," he said. "I want to go to school but I am stuck with this work as I have to help my family."

With a sack on his shoulder, Rubel goes to Matuail sanitary landfill on the outskirts of the city every morning and collects scrap. He sells the things to local scarp traders. These things finally go to recycling industry to produce metal, glass and plastic goods.

"But every day is not bad. Sometimes we get valuable things. Once I got two hundred-dollar notes! I sold those to some people for Tk 3,000. That was a good deal," said the child unaware of the real value of $200 in taka.

Rubel, like several hundred child waste pickers working at Matuail, earns around Tk 90 to 100 every day working around 10-12 hours a day. He has mother, grandparents and two sisters in his family.

There are around 200 families living in the area, which have at least one member working as a waste picker. City's informal but vibrant recycling sector starts with waste pickers like Rubel. Almost nothing that every household throws away in its bins everyday is wasted.

Children as young as five are constantly on the lookout for anything from a bone to a piece of plastic. The broken piece of glass that is dumped in a household bin today, is destined to be picked up by one of the pickers and sold to a bhangari, a shop that buys these wastes in kilos and sells those to different factories for manufacturing of various items.

On most days Rubel goes to his workplace at dawn and starts sifting through the garbage. He collects broken glass, shreds of tin and plastic, scrap metal and animal bones until the evening.

"I sell plastic at Tk 20 per kg, metal at Tk 18 and glass at Tk 2. One full sack of these things can be sold at Tk 200," he said.

In any summer morning the whole area is full of activities. Several hundred people including children are seen working diligently in the pile of garbage that covered an area of several square kilometers.

"Generally I work from 7:00am to 10:00pm. Sometimes I feel sick. I do not like working here but what can I do with an ailing and inert father at home?" said Kajal, another worker.

Every day 3,200 to 3,500 tonnes of garbage is produced in Dhaka city of which 42 percent is collected by DCC, said sources.

Iftekhar Enayetullah, director, Waste Concern, an NGO working on waste management, said composting is a profitable means to recycle organic waste. "We have three compost making factories in the city. Our aim is to stop organic waste from going to Matuail. We want to collect the waste from DCC or kitchen markets and then take them directly to the factories."

However, Dr Tariq Bin Yusuf, project director, Landfill Improvement Project, DCC, said that composting is not much viable. "DCC is not always able to recycle organic waste because at the initial level of composting it produces bad odour. Therefore the communities do not agree to it," he said.

According to him, source separation (separating dry waste from household level) is not feasible because firstly it will leave thousands of waste pickers out of their livelihood. Secondly, separating dry and organic waste at households is something inconsistent with our domestic culture.

"Some NGOs have introduced pilot projects of source separation in some areas [Asian Urbs in Sylhet, Prism in Khulna and Gazipur] by giving households two bins free of cost to separate dry waste. But these projects failed because people have started using the nice bins to store rice, pulses and other commodities," said Yusuf.

"Waste picking is a livelihood of thousands of people. By introducing source separation we will leave these people out of work," he added.

"In a social impact study by DCC with consultation from Buet in December, 2006 we have seen that they do not want alternative work because they have freedom in this job. So now we are working for their occupational health and safety by giving masks, gloves and identity cards. They will work 3 to 4 hours in the morning and then leave the place for the pay-loaders and excavators to do their job. This project starts from this month," Yusuf said.