Content area
Full Text
Introduction
An early morning at Bryant Salvage, a Vietnamese recycling business, finds a variety of San Francisco's scavengers converging to sell their findings. Vehicle after vehicle enters the yard to be weighed on the huge floor scale before dumping its load in the back; ancient pick-up trucks with wooden walls, carefully loaded laundry carts, canary Cadillacs stuffed to overflow with computer paper, the shopping carts of homeless men, a 1950s ambulance carrying newspaper, and even the occasional gleaming new truck. The homeless men unload their towers of bottles and cardboard while young Latino van recyclers shout jokes across them. Middle aged Vietnamese women in jeans and padded jackets buzz around on forklifts or push around great tubs full of bottles and cans, stopping occasionally to help elderly people with their laundry carts. The van recyclers repeatedly honk their horns at the homeless guys to get out of the way. The homeless recyclers, silently methodical in their work, rarely respond.
Equivalent scenes can be found in Jakarta, San Salvador or Calcutta. The collection and sale of other people's trash is a common means of survival for very poor people all over the world. At the moment full-time scavenging is most prevalent in poorer countries, where a huge variety of people collect, sort out and dean rags, paper, cardboard, metals and glass, often living on the dumps where they work. They either sell these materials for recycling, or directly recycle them into new products themselves.The United States and Western Europe have had their own share of trash pickers. The wharf rats and the tinkers, the rag and bone men, the mudlarks and the ragpickers, all lived off working the garbage of industrialisation until the early twentieth century. However in these countries welfare capitalism eventually absorbed most poor people into the waged working class, leaving only the formal municipal garbage workers and an insignificant scrap economy supplied by eccentric junk lovers, school-children, and the occasional part-time cardboard or can recycler.
Trash is back. Over the last ten years the US recycling industry has mushroomed on both the formal and informal levels, taking the form of a double tiered system which relies heavily on informal labour for sorting and collection, while reprocessing is dominated by large capital enterprises. Informal...