Cardboard theft | Hacker News Reader

Cardboard theft

bbc.com

86 pointssohkamyung144 comments

I'm confused by this quote:

"And theft is hardly ever reported by companies, because why would they? If magic pixies have nicked their waste cardboard then it means they don't have to pay a firm like mine to come and pick it up. So they are going to keep schtum [quiet]."

So... these gangs are wandering around picking up cardbord from business that would have otherwise had to pay for someone to haul it off? Sounds like a public service! Something is fundamentally wrong here.

It's the pricing structure. They charge less to take something away if it has some value. The magic pixies are taking the value out. It's a public service until your bill goes up to haul away the trash nobody wants.

God forbid trash be de-bundled from valuable material and priced accordingly. It might even give companies an incentive to ensure more of their waste stream is recyclable and less of it trash <clutches pearls>.

Debundling types of waste pickup results in greater inefficiency because of the high fixed costs associated with pickup (trucks, fuel, fixed cost of employing workers). This is why in most cities, pick up is only handled by one or two private firms contracted with the municipality.

That is, unless and until some groundbreaking cost lowering technology comes into existence. Given the physical reality of this work and the slim margins (it's commodities after all), that seems unlikely.

The best angle of attack for this problem from the market/technology perspective is finding ways to economically deliver goods without so much cardboard, since manufacturers and retailers have a strong incentive to reduce the cost of delivering products.

This is why in most cities, pick up is only handled by one or two private firms contracted with the municipality.

Corruption is the only reason this has ever happened anywhere. In the countryside, which due to lower density is more difficult to serve, multiple trash trucks serve multiple customers and there is no problem.

> due to lower density is more difficult to serve, multiple trash trucks serve multiple customers and there is no problem.

You can't compare the two like that because they are fundamentally different environments.

In the countryside it makes more sense to contract separately because trash pickup is less frequent and there are so few people in general - definitely not enough to achieve the economies of scale. The trash pickup trucks there are likely involved in lots of other businesses, too. And even with that, a lot of people in the "countryside" just illegally dump trash. They can get away with that because of the low density and lack of enforcement.

In the city, if trash pickup were something that households and business contracted out optionally, a substantial minority of people will not pay for the service at all and instead litter the the high density common environment with their trash. This already happens to a degree, especially with large items and construction debris, and without municipally organized trash removal, it would be even worse.

The day packaging disposal prices are internalized 100% into sales prices will be very interesting. I doubt it will ever happen on a faster timeline than, say, fully automated luxury gay space communism, but it's worth dreaming about.

I'm guessing the downvotes are from people who think you are being derogatory. The phrase "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...

Yes, it is basically The Culture.

That or society ends up paying the price when you have people willing to work in inhumane conditions (for a gang) rather than someone who can get a legit job in recycling

Sounds like the ‘legitimate’ vendor is price gouging and charging on one end for the pick-up and then is being paid a second time on the other end.

That sounds like the bigger racket to me.

The ‘criminals’ are just reflecting a more true market value, eg that there should be no pickup fee for the value of this commodity.

Further; surely this represents the best of ‘gangs’. “We’ve got too many Vigelantes out improving the efficiency of recycling in our city and stealing a product that’s being discarded on our streets. Oh dear.”

what is wrong? it costs money to pick up anything. equipment fuel salaries workman’s comp etc. thieves don’t have such costs.

Well of course the thieves have a cost, too -- they need to eat, too. But they probably pay no taxes and employ cheap labor and can undercut the official recycler.

The fastest the trash is collected, the better for the society.

These guys provide the service for free and faster than the "legitimate" one.

They didn't threaten anyone. They just came, picked up the trash, and left.

The only angry people are the "legitimate" waste collectors who pay kickbacks to politicians to keep this monopoly alive.

The legitimate business has a contract to pick up the garbage reliably. It costs a certain amount of money because the legitimate business will recoup costs. If they can’t do that because of the scavengers, the city, and consequently you and I, will have to pay more the next time the contract is negotiated.

If the scavengers are doing such a good job, why do we even need the “legitimate” business? In fact why shouldn’t the scavengers be considered legitimate when they provide a more timely service than the current incumbents?

It seems like the market is working as designed and the scavengers are successfully competing since they are able to provide the same service more efficiently than the current company.

Some of the legitimate contracts do get handed out based on political favors or bribes.

This being said those contracts ensure some legal obligations for the service provider. Everything from providing the recycling bins, to providing service to everyone equally, to providing service consistently. And the recyclables are usually picked up by the same company pickling up the garbage. With that income gone they'd just jack up the prices for the garbage, which I assure you won't be picked up by any scavenger.

You don't want your garbage or recyclables to stay on the street corner for days because the scavengers don't provide any bins, there's no money in garbage pickup, and your recyclables are too small game for them to go out of their way to pick them up. As a city you also don't want to realize one day that they just moved on to even more profitable business elsewhere while heaps of trash are popping up around town.

As with anything, if it's important you want more than just best effort by someone who's anyway just piggy backing on someone else's groundwork.

Scavengers might be opportunistic and only pick up the easily accessed or easily recycled trash whenever it is convenient for them. Legitimate collectors will have to pick all the trash at scheduled times.

Probably to satisfy legal duties. Someone, landlord or municipality, has a legal obligation to ensure that waste is dealt with regularly and appropriately. If they contract with a third party, they have fulfilled that legal obligation, and even if the trash piles up, the question becomes why did the third party not fulfill the contract. If the responsible party leaves it to scavengers, they are assuming liability should the trash pile up. Ultimately, this legal service is why the "legitimate" business isn't providing the exact same service as scavengers, though I agree with you it is less efficient at waste removal.

> The fastest the trash is collected, the better for the society.

If society in the aggregate is spending twice as much (or whatever) fuel to get the recyclables to the recyclers, a few hours less time spent waiting in the bin is not some kind of win.

> The only angry people are the "legitimate" waste collectors who pay kickbacks to politicians to keep this monopoly alive.

Some percentage of the people who don't want randos going through their bins are certainly angry.

Well, our municipal waste collectors kind of cross-finance fees for collecting the non-recyclable waste with the profit they make from selling recyclables. If someone steals cardboard, the other collection fees go up.

Aren’t bins intentionally left unlocked (or rather most dumpsters don’t even have a lock) on the streets so that whoever willing to take away their contents is able to? As far as the business is concerned they don’t care who takes their trash as long as it does get taken away.

This is clearly not the case with these particular dumpsters. The article shows a picture of a suspect exiting the bin through a very small hole that was designed not to let people enter.

To me it seems like he was doing that just because he didn't have the garbage truck that would lift the entire dumpster and tip it over into the truck. It doesn't seem like he's "breaking in", in the sense that that opening (unintentionally) wasn't built big enough for a person to fit through as opposed to being an intentional security feature.

The article says the bins were changed by city council for this exact reason, to be smaller and harder to fit in and take from manually.

Which clearly didn’t work so they did a sting operation. Apparently humans are harder to defeat than raccoons.

Mmh, your first point makes sense

..."it is estimated that they cost the City Council of Madrid a total of €16m in lost recycling revenues"

So in other words The City of Madrid has a recycling business and they are unhappy with the competition.

Problem is, that missed income will have to be paid by the taxpayers in the end.

In Roberto Saviano's 2006 Book "Gomorrah", there's a section outlining how the Camorra makes a lot of money from collecting waste (IIRC mostly industrial) and dumping it into illegal landfills that pollute large areas. They are obviously not quite as scrupulous about e.g. toxic substances as one would like.

Of course where the cardboard ends up is probably not an issue here, as we are talking about recycling. But there are still a ton of ways an organization operating outside official contracts and regulations can cut corners to be "more efficient" than the official contractors are, and they can cut those corners in ways that have a larger negative impact on society than the upside of the trash being out of the street faster.

They were also charged with money laundering. I suspect if they had set up a legitimate business and signed contracts with customers for "free pickup" and paid taxes on profits etc, they wouldn't be in jail.

Money laundering has this vague definition of reusing or reinvesting any money from a crime.

You can do a very minor crime and be charged for money laundering (which is a serious offense).

> Money laundering has this vague definition of reusing or reinvesting any money from a crime.

In the criminal context Money laundering doesn’t have a vague definition. It is a crime with very specific definitions codified in statutes, each having their own elements and controlling case law from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

For example, at the US Federal level there are 4 very specific types of unlawful money laundering (promotional, concealment, structuring and tax evasion).

And at least at the Federal Level the companion statute prohibits depositing or spending more than $10,000 from the predicated offense.

It depends on each countries, even inside the Eurozone it can get complex, for one of the European countries it is:

(1) Money laundering means:

1) the concealment or disguise of the true nature, source, location, disposition, movement, right of ownership or other rights related to property derived from criminal activity or property obtained instead of such property;

2) the conversion, transfer, acquisition, possession or use of property derived from criminal activity or property obtained instead of such property for the purpose of concealing or disguising the illicit origin of the property or of assisting a person who is involved in criminal activity to evade the legal consequences of his or her action

"the conversion, transfer, acquisition, possession or use of property derived from criminal activity" can be applied to a lot of situations.

Even a shop thief could be accused of money laundering.

Obviously it would be interesting to see how the judgment goes.

If there is any follow-up I'm very interested.

As I’m sure you know if you’ve worked in this area, there’s a vast grey area between “legitimate transfer” and “money laundering”. At least in the US.

Even with every best intention in the world, it was enough to keep me multiple years ago from starting a business that might have been both beneficial to society and profitable to me. Money laundering laws favor huge corporations and serve as barriers to entry for small, disruptive, often consumer-friendly businesses. As your description implicitly concedes, you need lengthy access to very expensive lawyers to operate in this area, not to mention the cost of other compliance measures.

Like the rest of the drug war, such laws have been a huge net negative for society.

I wouldn’t want random people coming through my neighborhood taking my recyclables. That’s one step removed from random people picking through your trash.

Local law may vary but in most places in the US, once you put your trash on the curb, it effectively becomes public property. Anyone is allowed to take it and do what they want. This is one of the main sources of information for private investigators, for instance.

This is why I run _all_ of my paper documents through a shredder before throwing them away. I don't have any immoral behavior to hide but I also have zero control over where my bank statements and such end up once they leave the end of my driveway.

> That’s one step removed from random people picking through your trash.

If they leave your trash cleaner than it was, what's the problem here?

What if two teams show up and decide to have a turf war?

Turf wars happen all the time. If there's a turf war over trash then that suggests that we're throwing away lots of valuable items in an inefficient manner.

That’s a different problem (which can be addressed by enforcement of other, existing laws) but doesn’t justify making picking up trash illegal.

Whatever disturbance that presumably causes is its own violation.

People are missing the point here. Stealing recycling from the curbside is not a victimless crime. Municipal waste hauling contracts are based on a balance between the cost to dispose of trash and less-valuable recyclables like mixed paper and the profit from high-value recyclables like aluminum and cardboard. If people start skimming all the valuable materials out of the bins, then the net cost to the city goes up, and they’ll have to either raise rates or make it up by cutting costs somewhere else.

That sounds like a plausible scenario, but why would it be a problem for society in general? It seems like saying "what if gas stations can't sell candy bars at inflated prices, they'll have to raise the price of gas". Or "if credit card transaction fees are regulated, cash back deals will go away". Ok, so be it. A sudden change might be bad, but is it worth seriously fighting a new equilibrium?

Yeah, phrased that way it makes me wonder why do we even accept the concept of discounting price on some good by raising price of another good to cover for it? In your example, it leads to artificially deflated gas prices, which isn't good for the society at large.

This is effectively how taxes on goods work. Governments make certain goods or services (or more intangibles such as income) cost more (taxes) which they then use to provide discounts on other goods or services (e.g. library services, postal services, reducing or eliminating healthcare costs, etc.).

The main difference from taxes is that this is private enterprise vs a purely government endeavor, but in that respect it's really not very different from other government regulations on private enterprise as well as contracts between purely private entities (there are plenty of proposed and actual regulations and contracts on bundling goods and services, which is effectively what this is, just with more flexibility than with usual bundling).

This shows up all over the place. Governments can force health insurance providers (private or governmental) to bundle both unprofitable at-risk patients together with profitable healthy patients. A fly-by-night insurance provider can swoop in and offer lower premiums to those profitable healthy patients. Nominally this seems great! Lower rates for folks who don't need it (similar to the garbage scenario, garbage gets picked up for those people dumping valuable garbage!). But now the incentive structure is getting pretty messed up and those at-risk patients are vulnerable to a lot of rate hikes since the premiums paid by healthy patients are being "skimmed" away.

Put another way, bundling goods and services in certain ways lets you control incentives, which can be used for good or bad ends. However, surreptitiously unbundling those things after there's already been an agreed-upon bundling can wreak havoc on that initial incentive structure.

Everyone has to bear the costs while thieves make money sounds something that is worth fighting against.

Keep in mind that this is only possible because they are stealing cherrypicked materials. No municipality would allow them to run garbage removal legitimately if they would collect only valuable materials while leaving worthless at the curbside for someone else to deal with.

Referring to it as stealing when the owner put it out as trash makes it lose the moral cachet. I don't have a hugely positive view of garbage men as crusaders for truth and justice. I have no clue what separates legitimate garbagemen from illegitimate ones. So far the only difference to me, the theoretical person who had his trash taken before the day I expected it to be taken, is it's a bit cheaper, so it seems like all of the harm is on someone completely unrelated to me.

If I were to pay these men to take the trash away, would that be better for the city?

Selling these resources and your bin taxes [0] are what helps the municipal garbage service covering their costs. If you pay another service to take away the more valuable parts of the trash, you would sort of pay twice, as your municipal provider would not be able to make money on these resources and needed to cover their costs in a different way.

[0] At least here in Germany one can not opt out of this which is a good thing in my opinion. Otherwise some people undoubtely would opt out which would leave us with either unhandled trash or the public having to pay for their trash instead.

The garbage monopoly makes me think about the cases of cinemas.

The core of their activity is at a loss and they make up for high profit on the side (selling drinks).

Then the cinema kicks you out if they catch you with a cola you bought in another shop.

All the shop did, was to provide a better service, at a better price.

This situation could stop if the law would stop allowing that.

The cinemas wouldn't die; the movie distributors would ask for less and less fees.

Now the distributors can ask for high fee (up to 90%) because they know the cinemas charge for these add-ons and make some turnover.

That would raise prices for tickets. Concession prices are there so rich people subsidize poorer people.

> "if credit card transaction fees are regulated, cash back deals will go away".

Why do you say that like it’s a bad thing? It would be great for both businesses and consumers. (although it would depend on how successfully it was executed)

And it would be a benefit to society if gas was priced higher rather than subsidized by junk food and the demographics more prone to buying it. Especially due to a certain something called climate change, and how cheaper gas helps suvs and other low mileage cars.

I didn't say it like it's a bad thing. The whole point I was making is as a first approximation, one should assume it's a wash.

A couple people have brought up what you're saying, and it's a somewhat convincing argument to me, at least at first glance. It's not just that having a new equilibrium is fine -- the existing equilibrium where cardboard offsets the cost of expensive trash is explicitly what we don't want as a society.

We want people to throw away more cardboard, because we want it to get recycled. A system where throwing away 'unprofitable' trash costs more than throwing away cardboard seems like a net good.

Even at a personal level, if the 'thefts' causes cities to raise prices across the board, but all of the cardboard is getting pulled out my trash by 'thieves', thus decreasing my overall volume and cost, then it seems like it still kind of evens out for me as an individual and rewards me for throwing out recyclable materials.

And communities/households that reliably throw out a lot of cardboard will be hit by 'thefts' more often, which will lower their trash bills even more, which is... yet another outcome we actually want -- systemic, community-wide, reliable disposal of recyclable materials.

It's simple theft.

It's the same problem for society as any other kind of theft.

Maybe some of it is theft, but some of it is clearly not. From the article:

> If magic pixies have nicked their waste cardboard then it means they don't have to pay a firm like mine to come and pick it up.

That's not theft in any moral sense, though I can't speak to British law. The owner wanted it gone. It wasn't owed to anyone else (or they wouldn't have to pay someone to take it away). A firm is upset they didn't get a contract, that's all.

It could potentially be theft in a legal sense, under s.1(1) of the Theft Act 1968,[1] depending on whether the jury finds that the conduct of the "thieves" was dishonest from the perspective of a reasonable person.[2] Although I do not think a jury would make such a finding in most cases, nor would the owners support a prosecution of those who provide what is essentially a free service.

1. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/1

2. s.74 https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2017/67.html

> It's simple theft.

I don't see taking something abandoned at the side of the road as "theft".

It was not abandoned at the side of the road. It was deliberately placed there to be picked up by a designated waste hauling service provider.

If I intentionally put it in a non-official purple bin, to be picked up by the Cardboard Racket, who are throwing me a couple of bucks a month to do it, are the Cardboard Racket stealing anymore?

No - but you are fly tipping. You could arrange for them to come to your property and go through all your bins if you wanted to...

I did the same thing with a piece of cardboard in my city just yesterday, had someone came in order to pick it up before the hauling service provider's designated hours I wouldn't have regarded that as theft. And I say that as technically still the owner of said piece of cardboard (until who ever came first to pick it up took it from the side of the street).

Good for you. You don't get to make that decision for everyone else.

But... it doesn't sound like everyone else has a problem with this either.

> "And theft is hardly ever reported by companies, because why would they? If magic pixies have nicked their waste cardboard then it means they don't have to pay a firm like mine to come and pick it up. So they are going to keep schtum [quiet]."

> This is very much the opinion of the shopkeeper we spoke to in Madrid.

One could flip this around. Good for you if you want to waste police resources guarding your trash bins, but why should you get to make that decision for the other shop keepers in Madrid?

It's one thing for a city to go after criminals. It's another thing for the city to complain that its citizens aren't doing a good enough job helping enforce the laws that they don't care about.

For sure, if someone wants to set up security cameras by their trash bin and report thefts, go wild. But I'm just having a hard time getting worked up about something where the citizens themselves don't seem to be upset.

I think you're being downvoted since you didn't explain your position, but I don't think it's wrong, just that it's probably not quite so simple.

Property rights can be defined in a lot of different, somewhat arbitrary ways, so I think a deeper explanation for why something is bad is sometimes needed than just "it's theft".

If the exclusive right to the cardboard was taken away from the people who currently claim it, then it wouldn't be theft. Would that make it ok?

What if I decide to dispose of my own cardboard myself instead of leaving it out. Is this also 'stealing'?

This right here. I save metal scraps and other valuable recyclables and take them to a junk dealer for a few bucks when I can make more than the price of transport gas. Most things that go in my trash bin are things I can't profit from.

Ok well where I live every two weeks they come pick up "big trash" which can be old sofas, tvs, but also recyclable plastic etc. Lots of people drive by the night before things are picked up and pick up the things they want, maybe because they will fix them up and sell them or maybe because they will fix them up and use them.

I think from the viewpoint of the Danish Government and the city where I live it isn't a victimless crime, it isn't a crime at all. And I'm quite happy when I throw something out and someone else finds a use for it.

I've noticed in my neighborhood, there's this guy who drives around in his old beat up pickup truck absolutely full of junk - broken air conditioners, fans, lamps, furniture, TVs, wood scrap, mangled bicycles, you name it. He picks up nearly anything you leave out in the alley, and breaks them down for scrap and recycling, or repairs it to resell. He drives by every day, and even though it's apparently a crime, he isn't prosecuted, and the community is thankful for his service. Our official "big trash" pick up is once a month, and some months it unexpectedly doesn't run, and the alley's would be quite full of trash without him.

Where I live (Poland), there are local Facebook groups (usually called "Attention, the garbage truck is on its way - $city"), where people upload photos of the things they see dumped curbside along with location data, so that other people can come there and pick stuff they could use.

I'm really happy those exists, and coupled with local "giveaway" groups, they provide opportunities to intercept reusable items both before they're thrown away, and after.

I feel many people focus too much on the "Recycling" forgetting about the other two "R"s: "Reduce", and in this specific case, "Reuse".

Importantly, those other two R's come first.

Municipal waste hauling contracts sound like a bad combination of government-granted monopolies and rent-seeking. If someone else wants to compete in that space they should be allowed to.

> The police have photos of some of the men crawling in and out of recycling bins.

The guys who are crawling into recycling bins are likely just down-on-their luck, broke people who are trying to feed their families. I'm not even sure they are worth prosecuting, and it's likely they are taking the food out of someone's mouth doing so.

I think this should be pursued, but unless they are catching the higher ups who are really profiting off of this, it's pointless and just hurts the poor.

> I'm not even sure they are worth prosecuting, and it's likely they are taking the food out of someone's mouth doing so.

Just to be clear, I think that these two 'they's are different. The first 'they' is the recycling-bin crawlers, and the second 'they' (the ones taking the food out of mouths) are the prosecutors, not the crawlers, right?

Yes. I don't think bin crawlers are leaving anyone hungry.

Article fails to point that Ecoembes in Spain its a defacto recycling monopolistic mafia, in Europe usually you get paid for your bottles and trash, here you have to paid a insane tax and then they sell the trash on top getting even more profit

https://www.metropoliabierta.com/el-pulso-de-la-ciudad/medio...

https://www.productordesostenibilidad.es/2016/02/ecoembes-no...

It seems like the obvious problem here is that the "legitimate recycling firms, and the city and other local authorities who take a cut from their sales" should be giving a cut of those sales to the residents and shop owners who are supplying the "beige gold".

I see the resale value of the recycling as subsidizing the cost of the recycling service. We pay for,(or your taxes do, depends on where you live) trash/recycling because then someone comes on regular intervals to take it. Part of that cost is "paying" them in the recyclables as well. Honestly the reduced complexity of the current system is nicer then having to pay me back like some sort of recyclables consignment scheme.

Right. I thought the whole expectation of a company coming and taking a bunch of waste and recyclables from you for either free or low-cost was that they were profiting from your waste.

Then you've created a logistics nightmare of tracking who gave what so that they can get their fair share of the cut, and inevitably parasites will emerge to exploit that network too.

Would that be any better?...

This is my reading of the situation:

Firms are disposing of their trash and “official recyclers” are being preempted from collecting some (valuable) portion of that trash by gangs.

Clearly the recycling firms are taking a hit, but they’ve also agreed to take a risk. Consumers could equally choose to burn that cardboard in their furnaces to heat their buildings in winter, or something like that. There can be fluctuations in output of that trash. We’d all hope, generally, that the amount of trash worldwide will tend to decrease (though of course, so far it isn’t).

As far as I’m concerned, this acceleration of the rate of collection of trash, an arms race between official and unofficial recyclers, should be considered a net positive for society: after all, a public service is being provided more efficiently to the community.

Does this affect the profitability of the official firms, left to handle only the ‘undesirable’ fraction? Absolutely, but that needs to be handled by market mechanisms, readjusting (upwards) the price of disposal of the undesirable fraction of waste, which in turn will drive down the relative cost of using that cardboard that everybody apparently is so eager to pick off the sidewalk or pilfer out of the dumpsters.

As usual, somebody has instituted a monopoly (trash collection) and is moaning that they’re not getting as much benefit from it as they had expected, because market forces are eroding away their pre-eminence. Isn’t this what what free-market economics is all about?

> Consumers could equally choose to burn that cardboard in their furnaces to heat their buildings in winter, or something like that.

They technically could, but disposing of trash by burning it is generally illegal in most countries.

> after all, a public service is being provided more efficiently to the community.

Every service can be provided more efficiently if you don't pay taxes and don't need to consider regulations.

The funny thing is this is just straight-up competition. If these guys can generate money from taking it away for free, why am I paying the city to take it away for me? Hell, if I owned a business I'd happily deliver the cardboard to these "thieves" than pay a waste management company.

> If these guys can generate money from taking it away for free, why am I paying the city to take it away for me?

If I had to guess, I would say because city services do not exist in a vacuum. The cardboard is probably subsidizing the landfill. If someone else takes the cardboard, they would have to increase fees on other waste to break even.

Almost every government service is like that. You may find a cheaper option than postal service to send a letter a couple of blocks within a large city; but if everyone does this, the postal rates have to go up. Urban and high-density delivery subsidize rural and small town delivery. You can find a cheaper insurance if you are a 20-year old healthy person with no risk factors; but if all of young and healthy people do this, the costs for those remaining in the public system would go dramatically higher.

> The cardboard is probably subsidizing the landfill. If someone else takes the cardboard, they would have to increase fees on other waste to break even.

If this is the case, the subsidy should be ended and waste disposal should be priced more accurately.

You can lobby the municipal government for it, vote for it in the local elections, etc. You will probably end up with a system like Switzerland's. Read on it, it is an interesting system, with taxed garbage bags and more granular waste categories.

But most people, and by extension their governments, seem to prefer the simpler system that is popular elsewhere in the world. Changing the electorate's mind might be an uphill battle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerlan...

They only take the cardboard though - leaving the city waste department the unprofitable job of hauling away the non-cardboard recyclables.

Scale?

A company can haul away recycling for $X as long as they get Y volume to help recoup costs.

When they can only collect Y-Z%, then $X no longer covers costs and the price goes up for the city.

The financial reports of Waste Management Inc are slightly less pessimistic :)

But this is the opposite problem. Our "thieves" haul much less volume than the real companies, yet charge less. Something's not adding up.

Don't particularly see a problem here since the cardboard is still getting recycled. Seems like a nifty arbitrage opportunity. Wish the government would channel their profits to creating a superior service instead of prosecuting their competition. Obviously there's nuances but still.

The issue is that the cost of running a recycling route is largely fixed - one truck, one crew, one day to run the route. That’s balanced out by selling the cardboard that is collected to a recycling plant. If half of the cardboard goes missing, then the cost stays the same but the revenue drops by half. The municipality is going to have to make up that shortfall by raising taxes or increasing the charge for trash/recycling hauling.

Well, the waste collectors will recalculate the price with more transparency and start sorting the lower value items instead of putting everything inside a landfill.

Then they will create a spin-off with more efficient people dedicated to collect "precious" trash.

I think that's a perfectly valid point. At the same time it seems like the incentives are misaligned. I imagine most cardboard getting recycled is from large distributors, not individuals, so maybe they should be getting rebates on their trash bills. But implementing that might be a nightmare so maybe you're right. It's just hard to fault someone for performing a public service.

They're being beaten by a competitor.

> Wish the government would channel their profits to creating a superior service instead of prosecuting their competition.

They could start by removing taxes and fees from everyone to level the playing field, as the thieves don't pay them.

It's the only point they should be prosecuted for: not paying taxes, but that's it.

It's not even sure they didn't pay taxes, because apparently they were working in partnership with a "legitimate" recycling center.

Is it theft if the people and companies throwing it out don't care? I would assume it's not the cities or garbage company's property until it's actually picked up?

>I would assume it's not the cities or garbage company's property until it's actually picked up?

Depends on where the cardboard was dumped. If it's on the curb somewhere, on public property, there's a stronger case that the property as abandoned[1]. However, if it's a dumpster located on private property, an argument can be made that the residents/businesses disposing of the garbage is immediately transferring ownership to the city. eg. consider the scenario where a factory dumps its metal scraps in a dumpster so it can be picked up by a recycler (who will pay the factory for the scraps). You also see something similar for restaurants where they have a dedicated storage container for oil, which a dedicated company picks up and pays them for it. In those cases it's clear that the "garbage" isn't being abandoned, and still belongs to either the original owner, or the company designated to pick it up.

[1] Although even that's tricky, eg. the process for clothing donations involves leaving your clothes on the curb for pick up. Are articles of clothing left like that fair game for anyone else to snatch first? I don't think so, given that the intent is for it to be picked up by the designated entity, not merely just abandoned.

While I think you're right (in terms of laws around abandoned property) it's worth noting that the gangs discussed in the article only steal cardboard in large quantities. At $80/ton, even a pound of cardboard is just 3 cents.

Now, in poorer countries, people absolutely do collect individual pieces of scrap cardboard, even at those incredibly low prices. But that's more related to a much, much sadder discussion about income inequality. If you want to see what that looks like, living on scraps from the streets, Reuters recently did an interesting photo piece: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-homeless-widerimag...

>> living on scraps from the streets <<

been at this bit ^ for as long as i can remember

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism

https://freegan.info/

Then put a lock on the trash bin and give a key/access code to the recycler. Problem solved.

In my country we have poor people making a living on recyclables. They usually carry carboad by push carts. I would have a problem if these vulnerable people got prosecuted for cardboard "theft".

On the one hand, it doesn't seem right for the government to use this as a moneymaking opportunity at the expense of other "entrepreneurs" but on the other hand the official pipeline probably adheres to some standards they wouldn't, like not dumping it in the woods if it can't be sold.

> like not dumping it in the woods if it can't be sold.

I'd imagine that's not as big of a problem as it may sound since the criminals wouldn't want to lose money like that.

That being said if the criminals are getting to the recycling first they're technically providing better (faster) service.

Like any other industry, I assume the value of these things ebbs and flows. If you look at recycling in the US when China decided not to accept our waste, I bet a lot of companies found themselves stuck with tons of material that suddenly had negative value. It's easier to imagine a government agency doing the right thing in that situation than a criminal enterprise.

That's an isolated incident. I don't think the cardboard they've been collecting all this time regularly will have day to day shifts in values that cause them to randomly discard some in the forest.

A lot of cardboard has no recycling value because it is contaminated with other materials.

For example, used pizza boxes soaked with grease are not recyclable. If you're lucky and your city has a municipal composting program, they can be composted, or some places incinerate stuff like this for energy, but otherwise they end up in the trash, or worse, discarded in the forest.

That doesn't stop people from throwing them in the recycling bin though.

The government doing it means that a previous generation of entrepreneurs or citizens had a problem with recycling that wasn't being solved adequately by private markets, so they petitioned the government to organize it.

The alternative is privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, which is way worse.

I would assume that as well. In some jurisdictions in the US there is a precedent that when you take your trash out to the curb it is no longer private property, so the cops (and anyone else) can take it and search through it for goodies. I would expect the same rules to apply to recycling bins as well.

Criminals are after the beige gold! Ha.

I'm somewhat baffled by how the government is mishandling this so bad. Just find a way to legitimize the so-called criminals, make it easier for them to work within the law, and then tax them.

That doesn't solve the main issue: that recycling programs are partially subsidized by profitable waste. eg. cardboard and metals might make a profit when factoring in cost of pick up and processing, but plastic might not. At the same time, you want to promote recycling across all types of materials, so you don't want to penalize people for recycling plastic[1]. If you have private companies picking off the profitable waste, the taxpayers will have to make up the shortfall. You see the same funding model in other areas as well. eg. the postal service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#U...

[1] Although some argue that if something isn't worth recycling at market rates, then we shouldn't recycle it at all, because it likely means that it's a net-negative for the environment.

Yeah I was going to mention that. Recycling programs probably shouldn't be depending on profitable waste.

This seems like a problem of mis-aligned incentives..

Yup. Dependency on profitable waste is a business decision that comes with some risk. If it doesn't pan out, it's the company's own fault.

Why does everything need to be taxed?

Just increase the frequency the "legitimate" trash collectors bid on the contract (if needed) and pay for it. Sure it will be a little more expensive because you aren't subsidizing it with cardboard but it doesn't really matter since that money is going right back into the community (through however the thieves spend it).

This is only an issue because government is a mess of silos, fiefdoms and incompetent resource handling. The people who deal with the trash contract feel slighted because they don't want any extra money coming out of their bucket even if the net result would be a wash for the community as a whole.

So at ~ $170/£130 tonne an average cardboard box which weighs 500g will get you 8.5c/6.5p. Assuming you can remove 5 boxes per minute that equates to 300 boxes per hour or $25/£20 per hour. I can see why there might be a demand but it doesn't seem hugely profitable unless you are stealing cardboard which has already been compacted or which you can remove into a vehicle fairly easily.

In NYC the boxes are already bundled and left on sidewalks all over the city, I think because they are required to make it as easy as possible to collect/separate.

Whenever I move I usually walk around a few blocks and snag a few bundles to assist as packing material. Little did I know I was actually committing a crime

This happens with cans and bottles here in San Francisco as well because they can be redeemed for the CRV. People rifle through the blue bins on my street every week. I assume maybe recycling pickup would be cheaper without this. Meanwhile turning in these bottles myself for the deposit would be a huge nightmare because the centers are only in far-flung parts of the city without easy access to transit.

In my town as well, street people are collecting plastic bottles as fast as possible in order to get back a couple of cents.

As a result, the trash is less full, it doesn't spill everywhere, and the "legitimate" waste pickers have less to carry as well.

And for myself, it's an added value: I don't need to sort, I don't need to pay.

It costs me 10 cents per bottle but I'm sure it will be properly processed and that the money will go to the most motivated.

Around where I live, it works really well in parks and busy streets.

But in residential areas the homeless people come and slash open trash bags, and dump garbage all over the street. Even if you put all your bottles in a clear bag for them, they will slash your black trash bags anyways just to check. It's super annoying and probably dangerous to them as well.

Sad :( This would make sense to be punished I guess (since it's damaging property)

In SF we have a separate bin for r

Can someone please explain how this constitutes theft. Under British law, does recycling left on a public street instantly become the property of the State? Could someone link to the relevant British legislation around this.

Not a lawyer - but the act of putting something on the street doesn't make you stop owning it. If you leave a bike unlocked and someone takes it they still stole it, even if you were unwise not to lock it up.

This is happening in Spain, not the UK. The truly hilarious thing about this is while they're apparently on the ball about gypsies stealing cardboard, the Spanish police mostly don't care about squatters moving into your house and trashing it.

https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/20/inenglish/15215...

https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/04/27/spanish-police-evi...

> They are accused of stealing and shipping more than 67,000 tonnes of waste a year since 2015, at an average value of €10m ($11.8m; £9m) per year.

> Believed to have been involved in 11 of the 18 routes in the city, it is estimated that they cost the City Council of Madrid a total of €16m in lost recycling revenues.

> ...

> Like any commodity, the price of recycled cardboard ebbs and flows according to global demand. Simon Ellin, chief executive of UK trade body The Recycling Association, says the current price is between £70 and £80 per tonne.

(67000 / 5) * 75 = 1,005,000. The math doesn't seem right.

67000 per year. They also said the price was historically higher.

Kind of reminds me of the rash of metal thefts in the '00s in Los Angeles. Thieves would steal wiring from power lines and most notoriously, an historic statue in Carthay Circle was stolen, but later recovered from a scrap yard and the thieves identified and arrested. Only after metal prices came back down in 2008–2009 did the thefts stop.

https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/miner-statue-...

I grew up in an area where thieves would go into an unoccupied house, and strip out the copper plumbing and wiring from the inside. It rendered the house practically unrepairable, and many such houses were abandoned.

There is a funny scene in 'The Wire' where one of the local addicts realizes they can just steal the uninstalled copper tubing from houses that are in the process of being renovated/gentrified rather than stripping old plumbing out.

Sometimes unscrupulous plumbers fixing a clog would cut out 6' or 8' chunks of 4" solid copper drain pipe in old houses and splice in PVC for some extra $$$.

Sounds like Detroit. A lot of amazing homes were abandoned and then rendered unsalvageable.

still happened in developing countries. people stealing metal parts from public utilities (fences, manhole covers, etc) to sell as scrap. and with it a few cases of deaths due to thieves trying to steal copper from power poles/boxes and getting electrocuted.

For some historical context, human urine and faeces/night soil have been sold privately in several societies (one episode of "no such thing as a fish" covers tenant's rights to same in... I want to say 19th century Japan. One was your property, the other the landlord's).

There doesn't really seem to be a problem here. The public sector is for things we agree collectivity benefit us, but can't be properly monetised.

Seems to me the solution is to just let the people take the cardboard ( and to an extent, other scrap material ). If they’re taking it to make money, some of them probably actually need that money.

I know people who walk around making a hundred bucks a day collecting cans and cardboard. They got no other job. They can’t get any other job. That’s how they survive.

Not to mention, that person is extracting a valuable resource (evedent from his pay) that society otherwise would have forgot. Either it would have been ignored or extracted at a higher cost (and benefiting those already wealthy.)

That's like saying shoplifting is extracting a valuable resource that society forgot.

In The Philippines, were there is a large amount of homeless people who use cardboard for shelter, certain homeless people are known to hoard cardboard and then sell it to other homeless people.

They can come round my place. My driveway is covered with endless cardboard from various deliveries and purchases. We have to book a slot at the local recycling centre and lug it up there ourselves every few weeks :-)

I definitely learned something intriguing today - thanks for sharing!

So, over here in America (Georgia) the recycling company won't pickup cardboard if it won't fit in their tiny bin; Which means by complex then pays our trash company to take the cardboard. using a dumpster that could probably last 4x as long without cardboard.

tldr; come to America, please take some cardboard.

how is this theft?

Isn't the cardboard simply garbage?

Nope, recycled many times. And with everyone buying crap online, there's actually demand for re-using cardboard.

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