Critics say India has become the developed world's dumping ground, rapidly poisoning itself and its billion-plus people with toxins from both the waste and the pollution from the sometimes dangerous methods used to recycle it. Every year, India imports millions of tonnes of plastic, steel, other metals and discarded computers to break down and recycle or re-use, often with unskilled workers ignorant of the risks. Large and medium scale industrial recycling accounts for less than half India's total recycling. The rest is done through kabadiwallahs, India's army of worker ants -men, women and children- who stream out of their cardboard slums each dawn to scour the gutters and streets for useful trash, from foil medicine packets to rags, plastic bags, glass and iron. The trash is brought back to the slum where, among huts made of cardboard and plastic sheeting and lanes lined by black rivulets of sewage, it is sorted, weighed and packed to await buyers from recycling factories.