Continuing my "noobs in NYC" previous posts, I was walking across Central Park today and noticed a couple of guys digging through the garbage bins picking out cans and bottles and carrying them in large plastic bags. This made me wonder if they were in fact city employed, or simply guys who were going to eventually cash in the recyclable material for a small amount at the end of the day.
Instead of writing a fairly ignorant posting about what I'd just seen, I searched on the web and sure enough here's another blog posting about it, this time the poster was in Brooklyn. There's another website that does an analysis of whether you can this for a living.
It seems this is indeed a private venture, and given the number of people I've seen doing it, a popular way of making cash if you are highly in need. It struck me a perfect example of a small incentive (<10c per can) and demand for a service (recycling that may be costly for city services to do) being provided by the private sector. Having the city doing the recycling would I think on first blush a) raise the cost even if it is distributed across the entire city through increased taxes, and b) deprive people of an income (however small) who otherwise may have little to no alternative.
I had a few questions about this. Does trying to get people to separate their trash/recycling even work in a large city environment? The subway system separates it for you which you probably pay for in your subway tolls. If you made it easier/safer for the people collecting to collect and cash in on their finds, is there a marginal amount of missed recycling that you could capture? There is often a problem with the collecting machines outside of supermarkets that are either broken or full early in the day. Is this a stable city ecosystem, or would a small investment yield large citywide results for recycling? Is that even needed? i.e. How much of the city's garbage could be recycled vs is recycled now?
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