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Now fashion is the name of the game here in Austria,  

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but you might be surprised to learn that some of the most desirable items come from one of the most unlikely of sources.  

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Satinder Bindra has been finding out.

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A cold start to rag picker Shanker's workday.  

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He huddles for warmth by this fire.  

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Then, after a simple breakfast of hot milk and toast, he sets off in his rickety cart to keep his first appointment of the morning.

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Just a short distance away, Raika Davi is already at work, busy collecting hundreds of such discarded and soiled plastic bags.  

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It's back-breaking work, but there's no shortage of these bits and pieces of plastic.

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With an economy growing at almost 8 percent a year,  

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India now consumes 5 million tons of plastic a year and will soon become the world's third-largest consumer after the U.S. and China.  

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But with growth comes increasing pollution.

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Rag pickers have traditionally helped recycle a lot of this material.  

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But now, a private nonprofit organization called Conserve has come up with a new idea.  

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It's hiring hundreds of rag pickers like Raika to manufacture more upscale 

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and avant-garde products, like handbags, sandals and belts from discarded plastic.

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Once the bags are cut, they're rigorously hand-washed in detergent.  

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After they're aired and dried out, they're once again sorted and stacked into these colorful heaps.

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The plastic is then compressed and heated, and since this technology is still in the process of being patented, we couldn't film it.  

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But take a look at this: the rebirth of hundreds of thousands of grimy and soiled plastic bags into eye-catching sheets.

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These sheets are then stitched into bags, belts, bracelets and shoes by trained craftsmen.  

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Watching and supervising the entire operation are Anita and Shalabh Ahuja, the founders of Conserve.  

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From just a few workers when they first started out two and a half years ago, the Ahujas now hire 300 people.  

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They promote from within the organization and plow everything they earned back into the business.

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Shalabh Ahuja is an engineer.  

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He's responsible for the technical end of operations.  

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His wife Anita is an artist, the one who's designed all these handbags.  

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The Ahujas now annually export such bags worth $150,000 across the world, a far cry from their earlier days, 

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when Anita says it was hard to get people interested in her work.

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Some of Anita's bags are now being sold in London's boutique stores.  

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Each colorful bag here can set back customers almost 40 euros or $50.  

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But they're buying them as fast as Conserve can ship them out.

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I think they are fantastic.  

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They are so unique that I've never seen any other bags made from recycled plastic bags.  

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I mean you wouldn't believe it if you saw them and you touched them.

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Raika Davi also finds it hard to believe a process that started out in the slums of New Delhi could have ended up in London.  

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She also has no clue that some of the bags she and others here helped make sell for $50, almost 75 percent of her monthly salary.

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Fellow rag picker Shanker now hopes other poor people will get involved in similar projects, schemes that not just recycle, but help build lives across the world.