By Molly Sanchez
We’ve all seen them, the people who hustle around the city collecting recyclables. They go from bin to bin filling bags, buckets, and sometimes flatbed trucks with cans, cardboard, and bottles that they haul over to the city’s recycling centers. For those hanging on by an economic thread, it can be a means to making enough extra cash to survive in this city. But did you know that this kind of collecting is technically illegal and one expert says it could actually harm the city?
I got interested in this topic after Bernalwood posted a question by a new resident who wanted to know the community’s position on the rampant recycling theft she was seeing. A frenzy of comments ensued. “When people steal your recycling they are stealing from everyone in the city. This is supposed to be a small revenue source or a subsidy to help keep your garage collection fees lower,” wrote one commenter. Another wrote, “As to recycling: yes it’s illegal, but it’s not ever enforced. I have less of a problem with it knowing that it is some people’s only way of making a living. What bothers me more is doing it in the middle of the night, making noise, leaving garbage, etc.” The issue garnered over 100 responses, showing that most people know this recycling poaching is going on, but no one knows how to deal with it — or if the bin owners even should get involved.
The overarching issue is that Recology, the company that takes your trash and recyclables, uses the money it gets from selling your stuff to recycling centers to buy more trucks and bins, and to basically stay in business. Technically if people are taking recyclables from the bins and selling them, that means Recology has less money. So is this a big fish vs. little fish situation with a large company working against intrepid individual trash collectors?
It’s not quite that simple.
Recology’s San Francisco Government and Community Affairs Manager Paul Giusti says that the company is not bothered by small time recycle collectors. “I feel bad for them,” he says. “ If they’re homeless or just looking to supplement their income … we’re not looking at those guys.” Giusti says Recology responds to the issue of recycling theft not because it affects their bottom line but because customers have complained. “The price of recyclables is set by the city based on supply and demand,” he says, meaning that the price that Recology charges for its services fluctuates based on the supply and demand of those materials. He says the cost of recycling theft is a societal one rather than a monetary one.
The real threats to the city, he says, are the middlemen buy from the recycling collectors. According to Giusti, there are people who employ fleets of pick-up trucks that “take advantage” of the recycling collectors. Those guys, let’s call them “The Trucks,” buy the recycling hauls and then sell them to recycling centers. More often than not, Giusti says, “they are hiring unlicensed drivers, they’re driving cars that emit a ton of smog, and they get involved in sometimes physical altercations.” One SF Weekly article from 2011 even implies that sometimes drugs are used as payment for recycling deals rather than cash.
When asked how Recology thwarts these bigger operations, Giusti says the company is at a loss. Recology has looked into supplying individual locks for bins for free, adding more routes, and even building a bin that only opens when tipped into an official trash truck, but none of these innovations are within the company’s budget. “We’re a service provider,” he says “and this is a social issue and a policy issue.” He says the decision on how to crack down on this kind of theft is up to local lawmakers and policy enforcers. “If the city decided it was an important to curtail this issue we’d cooperate,” he says.
[h/t/ Bernalwood, image via Flickr user, Timothy Takemoto]
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