The Bag Lady, Forbes Magazine,

Anita Ahuja turns trash into treasure, and helps India's downtrodden ragpickers along the way.
A dozen men and women are hunched over sewing machines in a workshop in an industrial area in New Delhi. They are making totes from a blue fabric that is neither cloth nor leather. It's polyethylene. The source: plastic bags that once contained garbage. Now the totes are adorned with labels of designers from Germany, France and Russia, along with the creator: Conserve, a Delhi nonprofit organization.
Conserve is the work of Anita Ahuja, an author-turned-do-gooder and a native of Delhi. Recycling plastic bags into fashion accessories, her group helps clean up the streets of the Indian capital while bringing more pay and dignity to the downtrodden garbage pickers. She sells accessories, including handbags, jewelry and shoes, to wholesalers for $5 to $15 apiece.
The products show up in stores in Britain, France and the U.S. (including chains like Whole Foods (nasdaq: WFMI - news - people )) at anywhere from $16 to $50. So far she's sold 174,000 pieces. Last year Conserve brought in $317,000, keeping $150,000 in its for-profit arm. That money was put back into the business and used to run a school for the children of the ragpickers--200 enrolled and counting. Along the way, she's taking on Delhi's recycling mafia and the Indian bureaucracy, and getting a toehold in Parisian fashion.

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