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SFist Tonight
Week Around the Ists
by Chris Jones
C.W. "Phone It In" Nevius is complaining about one of his favorite topics in today's Chronicle: "recycling rustlers." How many columns can one guy write about industrious homeless people prying discarded fine recyclables out of neighborhood blue bins? Why is it such an issue for people in this city? Personally, this writer is grateful for the rag picking variety of the underclass. Whenever some random hipster is forced to evacuate a unit in his building, thus dumping boxes of irony rich clothing, books, and assorted tschokes on the sidewalk, the shopping cart set can always be counted on to fetch the lot of it before sundown. No fuss, no muss. These people provide a valuable service to the community!
Well, apparently it's not just the homeless who are rifling through city resident's discarded Fiji water bottles. No, reportedly there are crews of shady looking thugs out there, operating fleets of trucks, literally ripping the half empty Evian bottles out of the hands of little old ladies all over town! This has been a problem for years! The police department has even been given extra funding to pay for the overtime necessary to catch these tin can hooligans and has impounded an impressive 59 vehicles and issued 157 citations. Good job, boys in blue! Sunset Scavengers estimates that there are between 200 to 300 recycling poacher trucks operating in the city at any given time and as of July of last year, the city had lost about a million dollars in profits in the prior two years to these miscreants. A million American dollars?! That's like a quarter of Nat Ford's salary! Or an eighth of the price of a Tenderloin condo! Quick, get 'em!
This writer is loathe to see what's going to happen to our fine compostables once mandatory composting for all city residents kicks in this fall. Yech.
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Will rotting banana thieves become the new scourge of the city?!
"C.W. "Phone It In" Nevius" >> GOLDEN
I think even "phone it in" is giving him too much credit. More like "transcribed sleep-ramblings."
I hate to wade into this, but personally it bugs me when I get woken up in the middle of the night to the sounds of glass breaking and cans being smashed flat. Plus, they leave the lids open and paper blows up and down my street.
In my neighborhood, there are organized groups with trucks that come in to raid the recycling. Not exactly your friendly neighborhood hobo. And the city depends on revenue from recycling to fund the recycling program (at least in part).
So, yeah, I know it's fun to be snarky about it, but it really does suck.
I'm an idiot who does no research whatever when he comments on teh internet, but I can understand some people getting upset about "recycling bandits" if you consider the county pays for recycling services, i.e. they pay for those trucks to come around and pick up your separated recyclable materials and have them processed at a recycling plant. When you have unlicensed guys coming around in trucks that couldn't pass an auto safety inspection if they bribed Jesus and are grabbing recyclables out of bins, then they are, basically, stealing from the county, and therefore SF taxpayers. Being an SF taxpayer, I can imagine getting kinda pissed about that.
If you're saying that ripping off the city (even for "just" a million dollars) is no big deal, then OK, but I think some people would disagree with you.
It's funny, I was just woken up last night by one of those renegade collectors outside my window. It's usually an old woman who spends about an hour painstakingly picking through bottles, ensuring that I lay there and seethe. If they're going to do it at all, I would much prefer the trucks that illegally come through and quickly unload the whole can in a minute flat.
And I agree with the above complaints about stealing our tax dollars being lame (while simultaneously disturbing our sleep). The guys with the trucks could very likely not even live in SF either.
As far as I know, tax dollars do not go to funding garbage/recycling collection. These services are paid for directly by building owners. The city collects 50% of whatever profits Sunset Scavengers and Golden Gate Disposal make selling recyclables. If recycling thieves take enough of the recyclables, the companies make no profits from selling them, and the city gets cheated out of it's cut. Hence, the million dollar loss. A million dollars is a lot of money, but a drop in the bucket compared to the near 7 billion dollar budget we're operating under.
I think a bigger issue here is that a.) this has been going on for years and basically nothing has been done about it (SFist reported on this problem almost five years ago and Nevius complains about it incessantly), and b.) the city has to set aside cash to pay cops overtime to bust people who are breaking the law by stealing people's recycling? That makes the kind of sense that doesn't. It also illustrates how low priority this is for the city.
I think the NPR article brings up a good solution by Fiona Ma, about requiring scrap dealers to demand that anyone bringing in more than 100 dollars worth of recyclables show a photo ID and to receive a check as payment. This way the homeless and poor people aren't the ones being attacked. But maybe it would be too hard to enforce.
Even though it is a small issue in the scheme of things, why should the poachers be profiting off of a service we already pay SF Recycling for (even if it's not via our taxes)?
The governor signed Ma's bill into law and it went into effect January 1. The law requires ID for people who bring in more than $50 of recycling and requires checks be issued for values over that amount. Considering this, it doesn't make much sense from a cost/benefit perspective that large scale operators are still pilfering people's recycling unless, a.) they ARE showing their ID's when selling their scrap and no one is asking them where and how they came across their booty; or b.) the scrap dealers are ignoring the law and buying the scrap regardless. In either case, it seems counterproductive and a waste of American dollars to set aside money to pay police overtime to go after these guys (in and of itself an inane situation) when some kind of monitoring of scrap dealers themselves would probably be more cost effective.
Let's see if HANC *ever* actually checks for ID.
If you want to see how pathetic city finances are, this fight over quite literally, garbage, is the issue. Because of the legalisms involved, when you put your junk in the recycle bins, technically it's now the property of the City of SF.
So, if you take something out, you're essentially a "criminal" even if you take something out of your OWN bin on YOUR property. Sound silly? Yeah, well it does.
the fact that a city is so broke it has to fight with homeless people with no incomes over fucking beer cans and bottles is a joke. This city is so overburdened with big pay and salaries, we're literally going to issue credit card bonds to pave streets - you know something that local governments are paid to do?
So while I can understand the righteous indignation about 'our tax dollars', I'd rather see people get pissed off at the fact you have a bloated city government that can find money for toys and games, but not for the essentials, and then they keep cutting services. Do your taxes go down when you get less? NO! So maybe if we had some Chron columnists who would look at the bigger picture, we'd spend less time beating on some homeless doofus who's collecting cans to buy some dog food, and more indignation on the parasitical city workers who do nothing and get big pay.
How much of your salary do you give back to your boss to compensate for the time you spend on sfist "doing nothing and getting paid"?
;)
Believe me, I can be pissed off at more than one thing at a time JUST FINE. So I'll be happy to be pissed off about bloated city government and keep being pissed about recycling poachers too.
you're not big on nuance are you?
beating on homeless doofi is a san francisco tradition.
The amount of money earned by the recycling program also is a factor in our garbage rates, so the less the garbage company recycles the more the ratepayers pay.
It is not the homeless person that wake me up at night it is the organized trucks with boards on the side that are the culprits. This is not someone scraping by, who need the can or plastic bottle to survive, but these 2AM businesses that raid the recycle bins and commercial dumpsters for bottles and cans. Although I consider the older lady with the rolling recycle pull along to be unsanitary, it is not going to kill me or the city to have them grab a can or so. How about a daily limit on paying out recycling refunds of $50 or $100?
Count me in with the crowd that's annoyed with recycling poaching, for all the reasons outlined above.
Breaking glass wakes me up, because I've had my car broken into one too many times.
Careless sorting that lets scraps of paper go flying really steams me, because I spend a lot of time sweeping up paper trash on my street corner that gets deposited there by the wind.
Beyond that, the whole issue of ratepayers subsidizing this ridiculously inefficient form of "recycling" bugs me too. I'd rather these people panhandle than raid the recycling, because they aren't actually helping the environment or otherwise providing a service to society, aside from the small-potatoes operators who get cans out of corner trash cans.
I think the solution suggested above, to limit recycling payouts and to pay by recorded check is a good solution to get the big fish out of the system.
I'm not a fan of the recycling scavengers whether organized or not because the bottom line is that I pay more a quarter for garbage.
BUT, and I'm a little afraid to admit this, I like the sound of pre-dawn tinkling bottles. My 2 am mind interprets it as wind chimes.
These recycling poachers, or trash fairies as I like to call them, actually are doing me a huge favor. My landlord used to pay for two recycling bins for our 3-unit building. Then she stopped and one was taken away. Now there's no room in the blue bin come Thursday evening, pick-up happening the following morning.
One group of these magical beings comes along and empties out the bin sometime during the night. Since I'm an early riser I'm able to put my recycling in the bin the morning the trucks make their rounds.
Of course, I know this wouldn't work for other people. But it has made my situation easier.
It's really simple to discourage trash fairies.
You just need to get creative with hoses, super-soakers, etc. Not restricting yourself to water is also a force multiplier.
In the country, they just use guns. So don't be a wuss about it. Your trash is your property until it's collected.
I don't know about scavengers, but the police can legally take it without a warrant once it hits the curb.