> Eric Dunn of Community Recyclers does not hesitate when we ask him why the recycling centers have closed: “Getting rid of street people by getting rid of recycling centers is the bottom line. It’s basically class warfare concerns.”
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_.
This is shortsighted. Why not just give them money? We already spend money on waste management to collect the stuff.
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.
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.
I got shouted down in a reddit thread for suggesting that getting cops to arrest people that were scavenging for recyclables was not the best use of their time and our tax dollars.
You seem to be suggesting recycling as a jobs program. That makes me nervous. I would rather have a recycling program that is as efficient as possible and a separate jobs program that is as efficient as possible. This hybrid seems to serve neither well.
They'll never make it illegal to be poor without a major overhaul of our financial system. The economy absolutely relies on people taking on more debt than they can handle, look what happened the last time that issue was addressed. Yes, I'm equating poor with "unmanageable debt burden".
> Removing one of the few legit ways the poor can generate money is not the right thing to do.
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?
The article states that the reason given was that the city now offers curb-side recycling. They haven't stopped recycling.
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.
I live 2 blocks away from this recycling center and visit Safeway almost everyday for either food or getting off the Muni.
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.
I used to live a block and a half away, and I still live 4 blocks away. I agree, it's not the most desirable thing to have in a neighborhood.
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.
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.
Modern waste management facilities can actually sort out cans and bottles from the other trash. For the cans they use electromagnet while the trash is on the belt that makes the cans jump farther than the garbage. For the bottles, something about the speed of the belt and an air pump. At any rate, better to get these people the help they need and out of the trash.
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.
The secondary effects of the bottle deposit plus curbside recycling are visible in my town, Portland Oregon. I know a homeless person who survives on can recycling and I see many other people doing the same work of pulling cans out of curb-side recycle bins and delivering them to supermarket recycle centers for cash. He works hard at it and while I'm not sure of the dollar amount, it appears to be a significant source of income.
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.
Claiming that "it’s a neat system that rewards litter reduction" involves overlooking the non-trivial amount of garbage cans that get dumped out on the street to make collecting the cans easier.
In Buenos Aires, they’re called cartoneros. At around sunset, they roll in from the surrounding (poorer) neighborhoods, and start stacking cardboard in the streets. It’s very surreal. They recently formed a collective and are trying to get official recognition from the government.
The onus for taking back empties should be on the individual stores that sold them. So basically a change in law.
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?
I came here to say the same thing about Michigan where I lived before moving to California. When I moved to California I was under the impression that it was a very environmentally focused state and that they surely would have as good of a system as Michigan but I was quite surprised when it turned out not to be true.
> 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.
This is the case in most of Oregon; it is merchants who collect the deposit, and the same merchant must collect recyclables and return the deposit to customers.
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.
> what do we do to help these people get work and stop relying on entrepreneurial trash collection as a living?
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.
That's how it works (sort of, I think) in NYC. The Duane Reade has a sign posted outlining the limit per day for unsolicited bottle/can deposit redemptions. If it's scheduled, you can turn in much more at a time.
I think one of the reasons for returnable cans and bottles is to teach children about money and work. Many people I know once ran the can business in their household as children.
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.
Instead of trying to criminalize this, it should be seen as a first rung to get people reintegrated into society. The people that pull a night shift are demonstrating amazing work ethic.
Some of the people pulling night shifts are unable to integrate into society because of drug or alcohol problems, or because of stigma against people with mental illness, or because of learned helplessness.
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.
> If customers ask, supermarkets must either redeem cans themselves or pay a fine of $100 per day - as must all stores and cafes in the area.
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.
In Finland, one gets 0.15€ per can returned and slightly less/more for different kinds of bottles. It is very easy to return these since every grocery store has a return machine and one can just take the money without buying anything.
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.
When energy prices were high in the late 1970s, my dad and I went out on evenings and weekends collecting cans. At the time it was profitable to do this without any deposit, and we made $200 (in less inflated dollars) on a good week. We made enough money to buy two aluminum bicycles, as well as many other things.
I lived 1 block from this recycling center for 4 years. It attracts nefarious sort of homeless who among other pleasantries, defecate on sidewalks, break-in to parked cars, yell violently at each other and passerbys (probably due to mental illness of varying severity), and maintain packs of un-domesticated pit-bulls. I am pro-recycling but the patrons of this center are a danger to the community and that is why it is closing and should be closed. NIMBYism takes on a different meaning when your city allows violent, mentally-ill homeless to do as they wish on the streets w/o proper care. I think the recycling policy issue here is sort of tangential.
It always makes me sad when I see people rummage through the dumpsters in front of my house. Here in Germany most I see doing this are older people. Some of them could be my grand parents. I know nothing about them but old people should not have to rummage through my litter to make a living. It is simply embarrassing. Germany is one of the richest countries in the world still I have the impression that there are more and more people rummaging through litter.
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?
I use to take recycling to that very spot (in banner image)! more than 20 years ago. Which I would never have remembered without seeing that picture. Human pattern recognition / memory recall is neat!
If you're that poor, drink tap water and don't buy beer and soda. You'll save way more that way than you could possibly make recycling.
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.)
[+] [-] smtddr|12 years ago|reply
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_.
[+] [-] wonnage|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kansface|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] runamok|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimtrigger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbazqux|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gcb1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstallings|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fakename|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gogo5|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justin|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bandushrew|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ianstallings|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rickdale|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] donpdonp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ultrasaurus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vellum|12 years ago|reply
http://pulitzercenter.org/articles/argentina-cartoneros-wast...
[+] [-] car|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] thecombjelly|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
The store bought them from someone else, so why ding the middle person? The last owner should deal with them.
[+] [-] tadfisher|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmsmith|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] warfangle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anatari|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meritt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeppoErviala|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danielharan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kalleboo|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SeppoErviala|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prawn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixxer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tankm0de|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarek|12 years ago|reply
Well, it's a good thing closing one "recycling center" will go a long way towards fixing that problem in San Francisco.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] parasight|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] njharman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frogpelt|12 years ago|reply
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.)