Ever wonder what those scavengers rummaging through your trash at 3 AM do with their treasures? The glass bottles obviously go to the glass-eating monster by the grocery store, but what are they doing with all the plastic? It's not like the homeless trash raiders are all organized and have some kind of black market recycling system where they all work together behind closed doors to sort the bottles by plastic types, and then quietly ship it off to China or something crazy like that. Except actually, that's exactly what happens.While walking my dog over the weekend, I turned a corner and saw the street and sidewalk pouring a river of plastic trash. I got all disgusted about being the most wasteful species on the planet and decided to take a photo, because I take photos of basically everything. One gentleman shouted to me across the street, "Hey, if I knew you were going to take a photo, I would have smiled."I responded by shaking my head. "What a waste!" I yelled. He came up to me and said in hushed tones, "Oh no, honey, what you are looking at here is not waste. This is gollllld." He said "gold" like he was a seductive Latino shark in a cartoon.Then I noticed all the bags were coming out of a tiny door in what looked like a solid brick wall. No windows. Just people pulling out Santa bag after Santa bag after Santa bag of all kinds of plastic bottles. This is the bootleg recycling bin, the drop-off point for the scavengers.Every once in a while the city decides to crack down on these people, usually the paper-stealers. There are private plants that will take household refuse from individuals, but once a bottle or a magazine is tossed to the curb, it belongs to the city, and they really count on that revenue. In 2007, for instance, Streets and Sanitation noticed a 33 percent drop in recycling profits, about $150,000. Since then, the city's been imposing fines on recycling thieves and the business who take their stolen goods, and impounding vehicles used in the process."I know you're not here to report me," my friend said, so he continued, vaguely, without giving too many details just in case I was a narc. At this place, they sort through everything, rent a big moving truck, and drop it all off at a private plant in Queens, where it's then sent off to China, who is a top choice because they don't have so many annoying laws about manufacturing pollution (wrap your noggin around that one). "That's how you get the dashboards for your cars and your sunglasses," he said. "We make a lot of money." (Again with the shark voice, emphasis on "lot.") We didn't discuss those Heineken and Corona bottles.Thing is, recycling, period, is bullshit. First of all, the city doesn't accept food containers, just bottles, so all that plastic goes into landfills anyway. Second, in some cases it takes as much energy to produce an object from recycled materials as it does to produce an object from scratch. Third, you have seen Baby Balls' Garbage Island series on VBS, right?My new friend is from the Dominican Republic, where, he said, "there used to be four rivers, and now there's only one." We chatted about this and polar bears and ice caps for a minute. And then his workers called "No mas agua!" to him, so he had to go—time to move on from the Poland Spring and start loading up the Coke.LIZ ARMSTRONG
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