In San Francisco, Making a Living from Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash | Hacker News Reader

In San Francisco, Making a Living from Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash

nytimes.com

125 pointspseudolus81 comments

About 10 years ago on Christmas morning, my wife was out for her morning jog and came across a full sized Yamaha keyboard stuffed in a trash bin placed at the curb... looking to be in excellent condition. Presumably the homeowners purchased a new piano or upgraded keyboard and simply threw this one away.

She called me and I drove down in a BMW (LOL!) and we barely were able to stuff it in the trunk. 5 minutes later, and after digging out a 12v wall-wart from the closet, I was pleasantly surprised that it powered up and worked perfectly

My young son ended up loving it, and taking up piano as a hobby, and now regularly competes in ragtime (of all genres!) piano competitions. If that had never happened I'm not sure he would have ever taken up music like he did. Crazy.

"Trash picking is illegal in California — once a bin is rolled out onto the sidewalk the contents are considered the possession of the trash collection company...But the law is rarely enforced."

Good thing it's now been featured in the New York Times. /s

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is to prevent scrappers from going around, dumping the trash out into a pile, removing anything of value (metals etc) and leaving the trash pile there to sit or worse, blow around the neighborhood

That’s a huge issue where I live. It needs to be regulated otherwise it is chaos.

That's one part. Another part is that the people that receive the trash make money of it and they don't like competition. When I was a kid paper, metal, peel (outer cover of fruits and potatos) and glass all got recycled, there was very little real trash. Now I have 4 very large containers that get picked up at regular times by the municipality and all the people that made a living recycling before are on the dole because the contracts only get awarded to large conglomerates who get paid for the privilege from the municipal taxes. It gets better, they sue when the municipalities do not produce the required minimum amounts.

Realistically, I think this law only exists for two reasons:

1. To discourage dumping of the whole bin's contents on to the sidewalk - happens often enough that it's an issue in some neighborhoods.

2. To punish picking out private info from trash. Things like credit card statements, utility bills, etc. that may contain sensitive information.

I really could not care less what people do with my trash as long as they refrain from the above two points.

The reason a law exists and the way it's enforced are seldom kept in-sync.

The article mentions that the city earns revenue from recycling too, and missing the revenue is a problem when that’s taken.

Yeah that’s definitely no longer the case.

Is the article incorrect?

“The city is most concerned about the battered pickup trucks, known as mosquito fleets, that buzz around San Francisco collecting recyclables on an industrial scale, depriving Recology, and ultimately the city, of income, said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for the city administrator’s office.

“That’s a significant challenge for residents because it results in higher garbage rates,” Mr. Barnes said.”

I would actually assume that the reason the law exists is because rummaging through dumpsters sounds like something a homeless person would do, and we know how California likes to try and make it illegal for homeless people to exist.

Perhaps that's true in some parts of California. The parts I'm acquainted with seem to be overflowing with homeless.

They wouldn't "need" to pass laws against being homeless if there weren't any homeless people to begin with.

Making something illegal doesn't make it go away.

Not San Francisco.

There are actually cases where artists throw away creations because they don't want it as their art and people pick it up and sell it as art pieces of this artist. There's been some publicity around a court case where exactly this happend to Gerhard Richter. I suppose this would be a third use case for this law.

I've thrown away my own art before -- not only art that I didn't want, but also art that I wanted but just didn't have space for.

Once I throw it away, I don't mind if others make money off of it. I'd rather have someone make use of it, and someone appreciate it rather than it going completely to waste.

USA is a civilized society, until the court sentences you - you are innocent.

With the exception of sexual harassement charges, where your guilt is assumed (based on the fact that you are male) and you have to prove your innocence.

Maybe on the court of public opinion, but that doesn't really lead to jail time.

I was curious about that line, because (I thought) private investigators are legally permitted to go through people's trash if it's off the property.

In many (most?) areas, trash enters the public domain as soon as it hits the curb (it's on public property, after all). Dumpster diving is a real thing that's completely legal, provided you don't make a mess (that's littering) and provided you don't trespass. Some malls keep dumpsters on their property to prevent dumpster diving, but many don't.

I actually thought of getting into it, but I never bothered to actually get out and do it since the reward seemed so small compared to other things I could spend my time on. However, there's definitely a community of dumpster divers out there that do it on the regular.

I guess I'm only somewhat surprised that this is illegal in California, and I'm not at all surprised that it's illegal in the Bay Area (there are a lot more wealthy people that don't want undesirables picking through their trash).

Not just from a billionaire's trash. Not many people can afford to buy real estate in the Bay Area, but there are many people with excess cash who can buy a lot of goods. And so many people (read tech workers) who are not from the Bay Area--or even if you are--change residences quite often. What this means is that they often discard perfectly good items in the trash.

My wife and I, when we lived in Sunnyvale, would find perfectly good items (a TV stand, chairs, tables) in the trash in our apartment complex from people who, I'm assuming, moved.

I ran into this a lot during in university at the end of terms. Lots of people moving out without a lot of time to get rid of their items - in particular international students that couldn't bring items home with them for the summer. Though I never took advantage of the situation, being a student that was also moving myself, I'm certain I lost count of the number of mini fridges, tables, lamps, etc. that were simply being tossed.

I don't understand that mentality. Couldn't they just leave the things in the apartment? Last time I changed the apartment, I essentially left it with more appliances than there were when I moved in, since they were perfectly fine, but I didn't have any use for them anymore.

Not sure about every case, but moving out of my college apartment we were actually fined for anything left behind. Naturally, the hallway was basically a dump on the last day.

I like your suggestion in theory, but what if the new tenants don't need the appliances you had left? Then they would have to take care of removing it.

If there were some app that could connect moving-out and moving-in tenants and both sides could agree on what the moving-out tenants would leave behind.

I’m not sure you need another app for that. Both people would need to sign up just for this one-off task. Usually if you take over a flat the previous owner will just ask you if you want to take over x or y in my experience. Also from my experience there’s a pretty good market in Facebook groups or classifieds for these things in university cities as it happens all the time. When I wanted to get rid of some item I just snapped a picture, out it on eBay classifieds and 1h later someone would come and take some table, chair, sofa...and leave. That seems like a solved problem already.

When I was broke and living in Paris I would fine neatly laid out valuables all the time. The most memorable was a pile of classic Chanel in a cardboard box that I got close to a thousand euros for. It's pretty easy for people to just do that instead of mixing items which still have value with household waste

For those like me getting a "you are browsing in Private Mode" window: http://archive.is/SIz0z

Man, it's so annoying that Archive.xx has decided to screw with 1.1.1.1 users by redirecting their DNS requests to a non-working IP... :/

"Mr. Orta’s favorite item retrieved from the trash is one that he will not sell: a collection of newspapers from around the world documenting the course of World War II. He wonders why anyone would have thrown that away."

Clearly someone died and their family didn't know what they were.

Or they didn't care. Or they had to liquidate their relatives stuff and get back to their lives out many other reasons.

Hell I can barely keep on top of organizing my own stuff, have you ever tried to culled through say a garage? Weeks of done right

That trickle-down economy is really working for everybody.

"There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin...“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”...In the blue recycling bin marked with Mr. Zuckerberg’s address, there were A&W diet root beer cans, cardboard boxes and a junk mail credit card offer. In the black landfill bin were remnants of a chicken dinner, a stale baguette and Chinese takeout containers."

Zuckerberg and his fellow millionaires/billionaires sure are living it up there.

reusing bicycle helmets is somewhat questionable. certainly a found helmet is better than no helmet, but best practice is to discard these after a major fall. not a great idea to use a helmet of unknown provenance.

This is true and often overlooked. Bicycle helmets are usually designed as a “single impact” device. Does it mean you need to toss them out after any minor bump? No - but if you take a real fall, replace your helmet.

Any bump, no, but any bump where the helmet provided any service to the wearer, yes.

They also have an expiration date even without impact. Same with child car seats, another popular curbside treasure.

Replace them every few years.

There's an amazing documentary titled "queen of Versailles" about a nouveau-riche family in Florida. The family goes to Walmart all the time and they have like 20 games of Monopoly, each kid has 10 bicycles they never ride, it's surprising but rich people also just buy a bunch of crap.

I don't think it would be a fair assumption that rich people buy a bunch of crap just because you saw one rich family doing it in a documentary.

Indeed, the wealthiest people you don't know are the ones who don't do stupid things like conspicuously consume.

There are more millionaires among your neighbors than they tend to let on.

Ok, but the OP's point seems to be that Zuckerberg is not buying a "bunch of crap" based on his garbage. Hence the ironic "living it up".

There needs to be a proper segmentation of wealthy. Your anecdote is of the quintessentially uneducated “get rich or die trying” population, where money is the new solar deity.

Almost exactly a year ago, someone unsuccessfully tried to steal Zuckerberg's trash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16723595

You can't legally steal someone's trash. The courts have ruled that once you've put it in public it's abandoned and fair game.

The police do this all the time to suspected criminals. They just pick up their trash and if there's evidence there it's admissible in court.

> You can't legally steal someone's trash. The courts have ruled that once you've put it in public it's abandoned and fair game.

This article specifically disagrees:

"Trash picking is illegal in California — once a bin is rolled out onto the sidewalk the contents are considered the possession of the trash collection company, according to Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, the company contracted to collect San Francisco’s garbage. But the law is rarely enforced."

And SCOTUS disagrees with the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood

No it doesn't. The case wasn't about ownership of the trash. The case was about whether the search was unreasonable. Did the person that disposed of the trash have an expectation of privacy. In that specific case, the police asked the waste company to set aside the trash allowing it to be examined and they did this without a warrant.

There are different jurisdictions and a difference between no-reasonable-expectation-of-privacy and fair-game-for-the-taking.

USA law is uniform since Greenwood.

Presumably you are referring to California vs Greenwood. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/486/35/

I got a really fancy bed frame that was left on the side of the road. We sterilized it, reattached one ornamental piece on the headboard and built or own cross-beams to support the mattress. It works like a charm and looks fantastic.

Conversely, a relative got bed bugs once and threw their whole mattress out on the sidewalk and went inside. Later, she heard a truck driving up and looked out the window and saw people loading the mattress into the truck. She ran outside to warn them, but they seemed to have gotten spooked by this and drove off quickly with the mattress.

Someone I know once went to take out the trash and found a perfectly good set of cooking pots left next to the trash container. She picked them up and tried to discretely take them home, only to be spotted by a neighbour... who ran down the stairs, shouting "wait, wait, I also have covers for these!". Now she has a set of perfectly good kitchen pots and a mildly embarrassing story to tell :).

My parents live near a liberal arts university, and every year, they haul thousands of dollars worth of gear thrown away by well-off graduating college students (grateful dead tee -> trash on the way to wall street). For a while they were returning gear to LL Bean to get money (I consider this a bad idea and I believe the policies were changed to address this). They also collect enough money a year from can redemption to go on a europe trip.

How about a separate bin for reuseables, with a once-a-month pickup?

It should be clear, so scavengers could easily see if anything of interest was inside.

Does no one donate to Goodwill anymore?

There's a line whenever I go. Most of us aren't billionaires, though.

True, but couldn't they just have their assistant do it? I doubt Zuckerberg is the one sorting through his trash and taking it to the curb anyway. Why not instruct your employees to try to re-use things rather than toss them in a landfill?

Goodwill is actually incredibly shady, and I refuse to donate there any more: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2016/10/25/goodwill-industrie...

That said, there are plenty of other charities and local donation spots in many cities for reuse of even items that you wouldn't think would be valued.

How about the other large donation centers, particularly the salvation army?

I'm not sure. I've read that the Salvation Army has had an anti-LGBT internal culture in the past, even denying aid to people based on their orientation. The top of the organization appears to be trying to shed that image now, but it's unclear how fully behavior has changed.

The Salvation Army is incredibly anti-LGBT.

To be fair that's specifically about the Omaha Goodwill. Different regions have different policies.

+1 Goodwill is rumored to use court ordered volunteers like indentured servants.

Every region is different. Goodwill of Silicon Valley, for example, has been highly rated by independent agencies like Charity Navigator.

I met someone recently who buys in bulk from goodwill, Salvation Army etc. to resell.

"I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm searching right through that luggage One man's trash, that's another man's come up" — Thrift Shop by Macklemore

So unfortunately your trash is also not private--you can expect that anything you throw away can be surveilled and used against you in US.

Next hot item for the luxury home--an old-school incinerator, for privacy.

Varies by state. State of Washington has laws protecting garbage. There is an expectation of privacy even once the trash is picked up, and can’t be searched without a warrant. Interestingly there are city laws regarding what you can throw away in your trash with regards to recycling/compost and my wife is eagerly waiting for these laws to be challenged in higher courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood

> In the black landfill bin [at Zuckerberg’s address] were remnants of a chicken dinner, a stale baguette and Chinese takeout containers.

He should have put all those items in the green bin.

People who claim trickle down economics don't work aren't willing to fold up their sleeves and work for it.

> "Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker ... Mr. Orta says his goal is to earn around $30 to $40 a day from his discoveries"

That doesn't sound like a good use of his time at all. He's clearly a hard-working and reasonably smart/capable man if he can support himself by thrash-picking. Why does he not get a minimum-wage job? Even $11 an hour sounds like a improvement over his current situation. Are minimum wage jobs hard to come by in SFBA?

SF minimum wage is $15/hr.

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