Now fashion is the name of the game here in Austria,
but you might be surprised to learn that some of the most desirable items come from one of the most unlikely of sources.
Satinder Bindra has been finding out.
A cold start to rag picker Shanker's workday.
He huddles for warmth by this fire.
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.
Just a short distance away, Raika Davi is already at work, busy collecting hundreds of such discarded and soiled plastic bags.
It's back-breaking work, but there's no shortage of these bits and pieces of plastic.
With an economy growing at almost 8 percent a year,
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.
But with growth comes increasing pollution.
Rag pickers have traditionally helped recycle a lot of this material.
But now, a private nonprofit organization called Conserve has come up with a new idea.
It's hiring hundreds of rag pickers like Raika to manufacture more upscale
and avant-garde products, like handbags, sandals and belts from discarded plastic.
Once the bags are cut, they're rigorously hand-washed in detergent.
After they're aired and dried out, they're once again sorted and stacked into these colorful heaps.
The plastic is then compressed and heated, and since this technology is still in the process of being patented, we couldn't film it.
But take a look at this: the rebirth of hundreds of thousands of grimy and soiled plastic bags into eye-catching sheets.
These sheets are then stitched into bags, belts, bracelets and shoes by trained craftsmen.
Watching and supervising the entire operation are Anita and Shalabh Ahuja, the founders of Conserve.
From just a few workers when they first started out two and a half years ago, the Ahujas now hire 300 people.
They promote from within the organization and plow everything they earned back into the business.
Shalabh Ahuja is an engineer.
He's responsible for the technical end of operations.
His wife Anita is an artist, the one who's designed all these handbags.
The Ahujas now annually export such bags worth $150,000 across the world, a far cry from their earlier days,
when Anita says it was hard to get people interested in her work.
Some of Anita's bags are now being sold in London's boutique stores.
Each colorful bag here can set back customers almost 40 euros or $50.
But they're buying them as fast as Conserve can ship them out.
I think they are fantastic.
They are so unique that I've never seen any other bags made from recycled plastic bags.
I mean you wouldn't believe it if you saw them and you touched them.
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.
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.
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.