Making a Living Collecting Cans
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
We need to start showing real compassion for each other. Removing one of the few legit ways the poor can generate money is not the right thing to do. They need help. Recycling helps the environment AND the poor! How many things are there in the world like that? Closing them down because the bike-riding, starbucks-sipping, smartphone-talking, organic-eating fancy & polished crowd feel uncomfortable around the poor is selfish IMHO. One day, we won't be able to sweep the unpleasant truths of our society underneath the rug anymore. What then? Oh, actually, I know. They'll make it illegal to be poor, so they'll all be in jail. Thus solving the problem _ONCE AND FOR ALL_.
Edited to add rant: You want to help the poor? Get out of that fucking chair and go help them. No one gives a shit about your self-righteous rants about rich people that reek of naivety. And don't even pretend to preach to me about being poor, I grew up dirt fucking poor. Now down vote that.
>> But curbside recycling is sufficient only for those rich enough not to care about the redemption value of cans. As Joe Rice of the Market Street center put it, “Curbside doesn’t put money in grandmothers’ pockets.” And as many beverages are consumed outside the home, recycling centers are still crucial to San Francisco’s stated goal of zero waste by 2020.
I can only imagine how profitable it is in places with a can deposit.
I'm sure you're harboring legitimate resentment, but your rant against armchair philanthropists seems equally self-righteous, as though poverty is a badge of honor. I don't say that to be mean or white-knight you, it's just how it comes across. It makes it worse that you challenge people to down vote you.
As far as I know, that is perfectly legal throughout the USA. Certainly there is no warrant required for the police to do exactly that.
I've actually got a big problem with the police doing that without any judicial supervision, but if it is OK for them to do it carte blanche, then in a just society it must be OK for anyone else to do it too.
This sounds like a job like any other to me.
What is a jobs program if not paying people to do useful work?
You have no idea what my opinion on the military-industrial complex is
But no, we can't, then it'd be a handout. And we, even community-minded people like Eric Dunn, can't stomach the thought of just giving people money. So we make them do pointless make-work, like collecting bottles.
The middle class people you illogically rage against are the ones funding the poor indirectly (and convolutedly) through their waste. Why not cut out the misery and give them the money directly? IMO it's less respectful, more demeaning, to insist a street person dig through trash to collect a bunch of cans before we give them their daily bread.
I have no objection to them doing so at my house in SF. They few I've spoken to about it seemed very nice.
>Stealing all of the bottles out of recycling bins...
Are you sure it's stealing? AFAIK, it's only stealing if the bin is on/at the curb. I believe it's otherwise legal.
>...out of recycling bins is also not accomplishing anything.
The question is: is the system as a whole accomplishing anything? The removal of cans from residential bins is the unintended consequence of a wider rule, which has (according to the article) reduced litter levels in CA considerably. All systems have unintended consequences. What alternative system do you propose that reduces litter and increases recycling rates? What side effects does it have?
Finally (I'm going out on a limb here): I don't think it's our place to judge. What I see when I look out the window is a person who has the determination and energy to push a heavy cart up a hill on a cold night, and yet a person who has -- despite those traits, which society values -- found themselves in an unenviable life position right now. When I see that paradox my reaction is to allow them their wish. Not because I do or don't approve of the system, but because I approve or hard work, and applying yourself, and because the very existence of their paradox assures me that I don't know enough to do anything other than make sure I'm not getting in their way.
Not pointless: less curbside pickup volume per truck means you can run with less residential-serving trucks (less time trundling back and forth to a big recycling distribution center).
It's a kind of ingenious way to decrease spending on municipal recycling collection, levying it on the consumers of the products apt for recycling directly. I actually wish the deposit were a little bit larger. What they do is enormously backbreaking and demoralizing work.
Also, how is it demeaning to pay someone for an honest day's work?
Entrepreneurs aren't offered jobs, they create jobs.
Of course hassling from cops is trouble.
Says who? Isn't Switzerland talking about doing just this, and doesn't Switzerland inarguably have a higher standard of living than the US?
We should continue to employ hobos for less than minimum wage to move bottles out of recycling bins into other recycling bins via stolen shopping carts at 3am.
Also fuck yuppies (and bicycles).
In terms of legitimacy, recycling bottles is about equivalent to digging holes and filling them in; the money comes from a tax dedicated to the purpose, not from people who want the bottles.
Compare:
- The government pays people $2 / hour to dig holes and then fill them in, using discretionary funds.
- The government pays people $2 / hour to "do whatever you were going to do anyway", using discretionary funds.
- The government pays people $2 / hour to move glass bottles from recycling bins to recycling centers, using dedicated funds.
Are the dedicated funds really a source of legitimacy? Where's it coming from?
It's terrible.
Just a few of my headaches:
• Smells absolutely terrible
• When walking down Castro with my girlfriend we use the other side after many overly aggressively slurs from the slew of bums that hang out by this heap.
• It draws numerous crews of drifters that recycle cans then binge on the spoils on the steps of safeway. Fights break out weekly.
• It creates a "hobo highway" in which my female friends now avoid because it is filled with bums. This looks like rape alley at night.
• Bums bring their dogs to wait in line and they shit all over the sidewalk. That was awesome to wipe off in the morning.
• The really crazy bums like to ride their carts down market street flying through red lights, which I was almost hit by last month.
It might be cool to support the ongoing of recycling centers so less fortunate people have a way to make money but try living next to the place before writing an article about how you think its so unhippie of San Francisco.
However, the amount of NIMBYism and mental gymnastics that goes on in SF is infuriating. The same citizens who support a government that spends $200m a year on homelessness are up in arms when services for the poor appear in their neighborhoods? The hypocrisy in SF is incredible.
I don't understand your amazement. It makes perfect sense for me. You want to pay money so that you don't have bums in your backyard. We do that in Europe, and works pretty well -- nowhere I've seen homelessness as rampant as in SF or Seattle.
Also the idea that the point of recycling is to give poor people the opportunity to root through trash is a new idea for me.
Maybe there is something that could be improved in the San Francisco Recycling process?
It's about the homeless in Vancouver, who not only collect cans for money, but then ride their shopping carts down mountain roads to get to the recycling centers. It tells a story about homelessness in a very intriguing way and the action scenes are pretty intense.
Source: modern marvels episode on wastemanagement and actually got to take a field trip in college and when I saw the cans jumping I was pumped to have see that episode of mm.
Intentionally creating these secondary effects to increase the options for people to work outside of 'traditional employment' for even paltry sums has a lot of potential.
http://pulitzercenter.org/articles/argentina-cartoneros-wast...
In Europe customers can return their own empties when they go shopping, by dropping the bottles into fully automated machines that dispenses the refund. So they get to benefit, and the problem is distributed.
In California, in my experience, the scarcity and sheer nastiness of return centers keeps most individual consumer from returns.
My one time attempt of returning empties in California took three trips to the distant and frequently unmanned center, and finally yielded a voucher only valid in the supermarket on which's premises the center was located. No thanks.
Edit: After my post I found this gem in the comments, enough said!:
A Functioning CRV System
These dynamics are fascinating to me because I've lived in both San Francisco and Michigan. Michigan is one of the states with the highest redemption values for cans at 10¢ each, plus the cost of living (and thus salaries) are much lower than in San Francisco, so each can returned makes a much bigger impact on everyone's finances. The result was EVERYONE returned their own cans, every family from the lower class to the wealthier ones has a trash can in the kitchen and "a place where they put cans".
It was shocking to me when I moved out to California and nobody saved their cans - the culture in Michigan is that throwing away cans is like throwing away money. Then I realized why after I tried to return a bag full - in Michigan, almost every major grocery store has machines that process can returns - completely self service, at almost every grocery store. The grocery stores use it to get customers in the store, and recycling is organized and incented. In California, when I tried to return that first bag, I had to go to a recycling center that was nowhere close to where I lived and in the middle of nowhere. I waited inline behind 20 or so homeless people, and the facility was filthy. In Michigan, the machines counted every individual can and gave you a receipt readout with precisely how many cans, glass bottles, and plastic bottles you turned in. In California, they sloppily weighed your bag and handed you cash. It was way more difficult to turn in the cans and it was less accurate and half the value per can. The whole system felt like a rip off & waste of time.
The crazy thing is what people perceive the point of the can redemption system to be. In Michigan, everybody gets that its supposed to get people to recycle, and it clearly works. Its like an easy way to save a little spending money or get some cash off your grocery bill every couple weeks. In California, a lot of the people I talked to about it thought it was a program to help the homeless, because they were so used to the trashcan foraging activity. I don't know how to respond to the idea of closing recycling centers, but having lived in Michigan where the can redemption system is functioning, it feels like keeping recycling centers open to help homeless people have an income is masking the harder problem, which is what do we do to help these people get work and stop relying on entrepreneurial trash collection as a living?
The store bought them from someone else, so why ding the middle person? The last owner should deal with them.
The merchant is part of and in control of the transaction generating the sale tax, but has no say on where the product goes after the transaction. That part is all on the customer.
> almost every major grocery store has machines that process can returns - completely self service, at almost every grocery store. The grocery stores use it to get customers in the store
I was under the impression that any store that sold a returnable was actually required to accept them. Stores that didn't have automated machines counted them manually and gave you a cash refund.
When I first moved from California from Michigan I dutifully saved my cans and eventually asked someone how to turn them in since I hadn't seen any bottle returns in the store. When I found how you actually redeemed the deposit I was quite upset. Not only is it hard to find a recycling center but they are often not even open. It is a good example of the implementation of the same thing having vastly different outcomes in unexpected ways.
As a side note, Michigan is quite interesting in general when it comes to taking care of the environment. In many respects the people care a great deal about keeping the endless lakes and streams clean and keeping nature healthy. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote areas where it is very difficult to do the best things. I once lived in an area that had no garbage service and the nearest garbage and recycling center was over an hour away. Most people in that situation end up burning their garbage. And, of course, air pollution in general is nearly ignored due to the love affair with large, old automobiles.
I say "most of" because retailers in Clackamas County lobbied successfully to abolish the merchant collection requirement, and the county now provides recycling centers. Ostensibly it was to reduce the burden on merchants, but there was a subtext that customers and retailers alike didn't enjoy the constant presence of homeless at the many retailers that provided recycling machines.
If picking up trash/recycling and depositing it at a centralized location is work when a garbageperson does it then it is still work when homeless people do it.
EDIT: This requires grocery stores to take return bottles, I'm not sure if I would let my children to a hobo-filled recycling center.
(I can tell you that the reason that system obtains in the household is that my mother feels very strongly that recycling is the moral thing to do, but I'm still struggling as to what lessons a child would draw even if their parents wanted them to)
If hypothetically they were supposed to be responsible for returning the cans, they'd quickly discover that they don't have access to many cans, and that they have absolutely no way of transporting them to a recycling center, or even going to a recycling center without bringing any cans.
My sister visited me over the summer a couple years ago, when she was 8, and I let her hold on to the jiao I received as change (US equivalent value: roughly 1.5 cents to the jiao). This made her happy (especially when she noticed a chinese mother doing the same with her child), but I didn't think it was some big project to teach a child about money; I did it because it made her happy and the quantity of money was too trivial for me to worry about her screwing up. It was trivial for her too; she never saved up enough to buy anything (most likely candidate: a roll of mentos, which would have cost 20 jiao. Turns out it's kind of inconvenient to carry around dozens of tiny coins.).
Anyway, as far as I can see, pretty much the only initiative a child can show is to pester their parents into recycling the cans for them. That doesn't differ much, in my mind, from just pestering the parents into giving them money.
This scenario doesn't work if the only place to return cans is a recycling center that has no other function and is located at a far away place or if the monetary amount received from cans is trivial. It doesn't work too well either if a child can just pester for money instead of having a fixed allowance + bonuses for work.
In Finland the return amount is currently 0.1-0.4€ per can/bottle and one can return them to the nearest grocery store. For me that was some serious pocket money - even a few bottles could buy some candy.
And it wasn't about pestering my parents to go to the store, more like tagging along when they went. I still had to carry the cans (or at least carry as much as I could if there were a lot) and return them to the machine myself - very different from just getting money handed over.
Anyway, my personal experience from my country of residence is that returning bottles is a good way to make pocket money especially if you can monopolize bottles from your own household and you have poor income.
There's not much difference between going through trash to get soda cans or being the guy who stacks the dishwashing machine, except that dishwasher guy loses the job if he doesn't turn up whereas the can-gathering guy just loses a night's wages.
EDIT: But I do strongly agree with your post. Criminalising this seems wrong headed - these people are helpful to society and are working, and we should be thinking of ways to help them.
It sounds like this is mainly a question of enforcement - and the willpower in the city to back that enforcement. Here in Sweden we have no law forcing stores to take back their cans, but I don't think I've ever seen a supermarket however small without a recycle vending machine. Then again, we don't have the homeless problem SF does.
The consequence of this is that some people patrol the streets and collect every returnable can they can find just like in this article. However, during summers it seems to be very lucrative business as many people go to city parks to enjoy the sun and some beer. Very few people bother to collect their own cans since one can just toss the can and be sure that someone will collect it within minutes.
I've noticed that the can collecting business is somewhat organized during the prime season. Major parks seem to have groups of people (sometimes quite young, children even) who try to monopolize the can collecting in each park. Periodically there is a car that takes all their cans presumably to a bulk return center. None of these people are ethnic finns.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It seems horrible that some people venture off from one country to pick up the thrash of others in another country. OTOH the trash problem is reduced and we cannot interfere with the free movement of people within EU.
In SF you could make a ton more money just sitting on a corner with a sign asking for money. Especially if you get a spot near a MUNI/BART stop.
Well, it's a good thing closing one "recycling center" will go a long way towards fixing that problem in San Francisco.
We can shoot people on the moon, have a space station orbiting our planet, and we can heal once fatal diseases. Is poverty really such a tricky problem to solve?
Here's another idea, don't accept it. Don't settle for poverty. One of the main problems I have with welfare systems is that it causes people who don't have to, to settle for being poor. If you just accept it, you'll stay that way. (I realize the improbability that someone so poor is reading this.)
I fully understand the difficult situation people get "stuck" in. The reason people are "stuck" is many times because no one is telling or showing them that there are ways out. They are simply mailing them a check to hold them over until the next check. But I know more than a handful of people who got out of the ghetto and welfare situations and it wasn't a government program that pulled them out. There was community help, like churches, for instance. But in almost every case they bootstrapped their way out. They started by deciding to be honest. They accepted responsibility. They listened to good advice.
When flat broke, what are you going to lose by moving? What do you have to move? Not much. Try something, anything.
My overarching point is that welfare handouts hurt more people than they help in the long term. They create reliance instead of independence.
EDIT: As I thought about this a bit more, I realized your scenario and my point are not that far apart. The 40 year old woman with a high school diploma and 3 kids in your example may not be able to change her own circumstances that easily but she has three little minds that she can mold day after day about rising above those circumstances. Instead, what we usually see is poverty passed on to the next generation. If she accepts poverty as a way of life she is more likely to pass the mindset on to her kids.
Uh, they have to dig through the trash and go out and collect bottles because they're not their bottles...