Re:Making a Living Collecting Cans
by dllthomas on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @10:59PM
(#6519181)
Even if it's not stealing (and I don't see any reason to actually call it that), it's nonetheless pretty close to pointless to move remove bottles and cans from recycling bins that will be picked up by a truck anyway into a shopping cart and drag them across town. It may be a slightly negative side-effect of an on-balance worthwhile policy, but it's odd to consider it positive when there are better ways to help people.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> nonetheless pretty close to pointless to move remove bottles and cans from recycling bins that will be picked up by a truck anyway
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.
Pretty close to pointless - the trucks still need to run and the marginal cost of a truck carrying an additional can is almost certainly way the hell less than 5 cents. Meanwhile, we're paying these people way less than minimum wage. It still doesn't seem like that part of it makes any sense.
The trucks will just be going to the new distribution center instead of the old one. Also, the article points out that this doesn't decrease spending since the city would otherwise make the money from the stolen cans.
When you put refuse to the curb, it's generally regarded as discarded. That word -- stolen -- doesn't mean what you think it means.
If the collection is partly subsidized by the presence of recyclables in that refuse, does that change things? I don't know enough about trash collection to know to what degree that's the case (I would expect it to vary by municipality).