Few minutes next to a garbage dump

The general timings for garbage collection in our apartment is about 9:30 am. We keep the garbage at a designated point in each floor and it is collected by an employee of the apartment and dumped into the garbage dump. Since I was out this morning, I decided to go and dump the garbage into the garbage dump in the morning. Many days, our maid packs the garbage in one of the ubiquitous polythene bags and deposits it in the garbage dump.

After I dumped my garbage in the dump , saw a rag picker come along. Curiousity got the better of me and I hung around for a moment to see what he was upto. He promptly left his pickings of the day ( A huge sack) at the entrance of the dump, and walked in comfortably. He made his way to one corner of the garbage dump and squatted. He picked up a big bag , opened the contents. There were a couple of milk satchets( 1/2 liter Nandini and heritage ones, he put them in a bag meant for those).Then he removed trash carefully , found a plastic packing box (the one you get when you take away stuff from pot luck or adigas), he emptied the contents (something rotten probably a day or 2 old) put it in another bag meant for those. By now I was looking into his rucksack. He had separated out the contents into the following categories.

1) Lots of cardboard that had not decomposed , he had managed to pick (from this and other apartment dumps).
2) Plastic boxes, the type that u pack food in
3) milk sachets.
4) Misc stuff

Obviously the rag picker takses all of these and recycles it someplace where he makes his mite (in addition to leftover pickings in garbage bins)

Some of the garbage was decomposing and I could see worms crawling around, but the ragpicker (RP for short) didn't look oo inconvenienced sharing his space with these creepy crawlies.
Some thoughts kept coming to me. If we could design a system where we separate out the different type of garbage ( at a minimal effort), it would make the life of this RP much easier. He would be able to make more rounds in a single day. Also I am appalled at the amount of plastic litter that I find in the outskirts of Bangalore in all the lakes. However, I've noticed that the milk sachets don't seem to make it there. Most of the litter consists of the ubiquitous plastic carry bags that every store dishes out with purchase.