Things that are easy to recycle, like metal cans, plastic, and glass bottles, are indeed collected by less well-off people for money, sometimes in a competitive fashion. Some people even steal segments of working electric cables and sell them for scrap, because of high profit margins. So there are areas where recycling is commercially viable and prosperous.

These areas are few, though. Most of the time the cost of separating valuable materials from each other in a trashed item far exceeds the value of the materials recovered.