In many Indian cities, the bag you knot at night is opened by hand by someone whose name you do not know. She separates the plastic from the metal, and she does it because we did not.

We treat segregation as a duty we owe the municipality: a green bin and a blue bin. Yet the person who gains from a clean dry bag is the one who sorts it. A study by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste found that waste pickers contribute up to 80 percent of plastic waste collection in India. Estimates of how many there are run from 1.5 million to 4 million, a wide range because nobody counts them well. In Delhi, an older Chintan fact sheet put the informal recycling workforce at about 160,000 people, most of them collecting on cycles or on foot over 11 to 16 kilometres a day.

That is why awareness of rag pickers so often fails. It asks for sympathy, and sympathy costs nothing and changes nothing. The picker is the last stage of our waste system and the household is the first. When we skip our stage, she works through wet, mixed waste to finish hers, without a salary, exposed to cuts and infection. Clean segregation is the cheapest respect a household can pay her.

Even our vocabulary is behind. The First World Conference of Waste Pickers, held in Colombia in 2008, settled on the term waste picker to replace scavenger, and India's Solid Waste Management Rules first used it in 2016. I use rag picker here because the topic does, but in Indian law the worker has been a waste picker for ten years.

A fair objection says that praising informal work excuses it. The job is hazardous and insecure, so the answer, some argue, is machines and contracts instead of gratitude. That is right about the conditions and wrong about the choice. In 2014 the nonprofit Hasiru Dala found that about 4,200 registered pickers save Bengaluru roughly Rs 23 crore a year that would otherwise be added to its Rs 450 crore waste budget. In Pune, the SWaCH cooperative has around 2,800 members and collects from about 500,000 households. Both cities built their systems around pickers.

What should change is small and checkable. Keep dry waste separate and hand it directly to whoever collects it. Learn that person's name. Then ask your local body whether the pickers in your area are registered. It costs a phone call. Bengaluru's civic body was the first in India to do it.

The Pune story has one more detail. After SWaCH's women began to carry themselves with pride, some well off residents asked whether someone could train them to be less arrogant.