Sorry about so much text.

In the past 30 years trash has gone from being a nuisance to a valuable resource for raw materials.
Almost all of the laws against dumpster diving came in when the cities (and the companies they contracted their waste disposal to) started to understand how much money all the scrap plastic and metal they were trying to bury was worth.
We have cases here where people are charged with theft for picking stuff out of the dump. In some cases it is even just for grabbing a bag of shredded paper to use as bedding for their pets.

Paper is often worth as much as scrap sheet metal and a look through the prices for most of the recycled material can be a real eye opener. A lot of communities even manage to squeeze a profit out of the organics by composting them and selling the compost through garden centers.


Trash has become valuable enough that about 20 years ago some communities reclaimed old dumps by mining them out and processing them through trash separators. Not only did they get to keep using their dump, they got paid for the metals and plastics too.
Usually an old dump has better metal values than most mine ores do and the metals are easier to process. (consider for a moment that an old cathode ray TV screen has at least 5 pounds of lead in the glass)

And then there are the overseas markets for trash...

It is not because of the homeless guy trying to scrounge food that the laws against dumpster diving are in place.
Nobody really cares about waste food at this point, and nobody really cares if a homeless person gets food poisoning and dies.
The welfare cases gathering pop bottles were not the big concern here either
But when they discovered that an army of scrap metal pickers were existing on what they could grab out of dumpsters it became a concern. Stopping them from collecting from the curb recycling boxes was next and now all trash has become private property owned by the recyclers.

It all makes me think about the rag and bone collectors from Dicken's England



Edited by scafool (03/22/10 03:49 PM)
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