Honor among scavengers

Bottles and cans clanged in Richard Hart’s half-full shopping cart as he pushed it toward the next block of houses in Sherman Oaks.

He didn’t expect to cross paths with half a dozen other recycling scavengers -- people who, like him, on trash days collect discarded containers to cash in on their 5- and 10-cent deposit values. Other people’s trash, in their eyes, is like nickels and dimes.

But on this tranquil Wednesday morning, the unintended convergence of shopping carts soon turned into a tense negotiation. With raised voices and hand signals, the scavengers determined who had already picked what blocks clean, and what areas of the neighborhood were still stocked with glass, plastic and aluminum.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Hart, 53, who lives below a nearby freeway underpass. “Those people must be out-of-towners who heard the canning was good here.”

As he turned his cart around to try another street, he said, “There’s too much competition out here today.”

With newly increased values for recyclables, many long-time scavengers are running into more rivals in what was already an intensely territorial line of work.

Still others are starting to collect bottles and cans for the first time, as the practice becomes more attractive to both the homeless eking out an existence and families seeking supplemental income.

On Jan. 1, the California redemption value for a 12-ounce bottle or can went up from 4 cents to 5 cents. Larger containers are now worth 10 cents, up from 8 cents each. That works out to about $1.55 a pound for aluminum, an all-time high. It may seem like pocket change, but for those who make a living collecting the containers, it’s a 20% raise.

City officials expressed ambivalence about scavengers. On one hand it means that bottles and cans are diverted from valuable landfill space. On the other, the city loses money -- how much is not known. Currently, more than 85% of city residents put their recyclables in separate blue bins, which are collected alongside household trash. In 2006, the city earned about $3.3 million for the bottles and cans that were not scavenged.

“Somebody is making that money. It’s a loss to the city, but our main concern is diversion from the landfill,” said Miguel Zermeno, the city’s curbside recycling project manager.

Neighborhood reaction

Residents, too, expressed mixed feelings about scavengers.

Mother and daughter Dorothy Elise Wilcox and Kathy Wilcox, 40-year residents of Windsor Square, said they sympathize more with the scavengers than with the city.

“It doesn’t bother us, and no one’s ever left a mess,” Kathy Wilcox said. “If they make money that way, so be it. It’s better than panhandling.”

Yoli Sheridan, also of Windsor Square, leaves her bottles and cans in a cardboard box outside her trash bin to make it easier for scavengers to get to. She usually finds them gone hours later, with the box neatly folded.

Rafael Garcia, 42, walks to Windsor Square from Hollywood every Thursday to scavenge through the trash bins. He said the recent rise in the deposit prices makes the time he spends on the endeavor more worthwhile, but it doesn’t entice him to make it a full-time job.

“If I had money, do you think I’d be here picking up trash?” he said in Spanish. “They’re like coins thrown on the ground. Of course I’m going to pick them up.”

But city officials regularly receive homeowner complaints about scavengers’ sometimes noisy late-night and early-morning forays into peoples’ dumpsters and curbside trash bins, though they keep no statistics, said Jose Garcia, refuse collection superintendent for the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation.

“Scavenging is a multi-tiered problem,” he said. “Not only are they taking the recycling out of the bins, which belong to the city, but they’re also invading people’s personal space. People get offended by that.”

Yet city officials acknowledge that the misdemeanor law against taking others’ trash is largely unenforced. Only police can issue citations, and it’s rare for them to catch people in the act. And going after scavengers is far from one of the LAPD’s top priorities. The most common infraction scavengers face is a $50 fine for removing a shopping cart from a parking lot.

Inglewood has taken a harder line, hiring three full-time employees to stop the practice, which officials blame for lost revenue and a “poor aesthetic,” said Angela Williams, environmental services manager for Inglewood.

Armed with radios and digital cameras, they started earnestly enforcing laws against scavenging in 2005 and have since ticketed 135 people. The penalty can be up to $1,000 or six months in jail. But no one has been fined more than $100, and no one has been jailed.

“When we started, we were seeing 20 scavengers a day, and now, we’re lucky if we find three a week,” said Kenneth Henderson, one of the city’s community services inspectors.

Income redistribution

Can and bottle redemption programs in California and 10 other states, designed to boost recycling rates, were meant to give people an incentive to recycle their discarded containers that might otherwise be destined for a landfill.

But the programs have also become a form of income redistribution, said Bevin Ashenmiller, an economics professor at Occidental College who has studied scavengers in Southern California.

“People who have a really high value of their time don’t take stuff back to the recycling center,” she said. “It acts like a tax on the rich people that gets distributed back to lower-income people.”

In California, redemption rates remain below the state mandate of 80%; in 2005, Californians recycled 61% of the bottles and cans covered by the redemption program, according to the California Department of Conservation.

The national recycling rate for beverage containers is even lower, estimated at 33% nationwide, said Betty McLaughlin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.

A December 2006 report to Congress by the Government Accountability Office recommended strengthening recycling rates nationwide by stimulating markets for recycled goods. One of its suggestions: a national container deposit program.

The fact that people find valuable commodities in others’ trash bins makes for some unlikely encounters, as low-income and homeless scavengers scour nearly every neighborhood in the county to cash in on their cans.

In Sherman Oaks, scavengers Hart and his friend James Tentindo work as a team to cover more territory.

As their carts rattle down the street, muffling their speech as they walk from block to block, they sometimes pique the disapproving gazes of homeowners.

As Hart rifled through her curbside bin, Evlin Saghian, 26, looked suspiciously toward the street as she put her two children in the back of her luxury SUV.

“I don’t like someone digging through my trash. It’s annoying,” she said. “I don’t like it in this neighborhood. It makes it seem low-class and cheap.”

Scavenging has a code of conduct, Hart and Tentindo said: Don’t go onto private property. Don’t leave a mess. Don’t cross over someone else’s route. Greet residents if they come outside. Don’t make too much noise.

“Anyone who doesn’t follow the rules, we run off,” Tentindo said.

They have to work fast. Not only do they have to get a leg up on the competition, they have to keep ahead of the city sanitation truck they’ve dubbed “the green monster.”

“It’s a monster because it eats up our money,” Hart said.

Their efforts can sometimes lead to legendary hauls, such as one day last summer -- when they each tied several shopping carts together and filled them with the remnants of Fourth of July parties -- when they took in $322.

But after four hours of collecting on a recent morning, Hart called it quits, taking his shopping cart to the nearest recycling center to cash in.

Enrique Jimenez, the attendant of the squat recycling receptacle in the corner of a Ralphs grocery store parking lot, watched as Hart sorted his bottles and cans and chucked them into plastic bins. Jimenez then weighed them on a scale and printed out a voucher for $19.30.

It was a bad day, Hart grumbled as he walked inside the grocery store to redeem his cash. He is used to getting around $40, and attributes the shortfall to other scavengers’ intrusions into his territory.

‘This is my job’

In Inglewood, Martina Miraflores hasn’t let the city’s crackdown on scavengers deter her. She goes out at night, finishing up about 5 a.m. She and her husband, Mauricio Garcia, push carts down alleys to collect recyclables from the back doors of Inglewood bars.

“This is my job. I do it every night. The only thing I worry about is getting a ticket,” she said in Spanish. There are other risks: She carries a machete for protection, and once was threatened by a man with a pistol.

Maria Sanchez, 51, started collecting cans outside her Van Nuys apartment for grocery money four months ago. Later, she tried it with a shopping cart and made more money.

She had just left her job cleaning houses in Santa Monica and Northridge, where she made about $80 a day but rarely saw her family because of the long hours.

She and her husband Simon, 57, now scavenge together four mornings a week. They fill the back of their minivan with as much as $200 worth of bottles and cans every week.

Maria prefers the flexible schedule of scavenging, which she said gives her more time to pick up and drop off her 9-year-old son, Itzhak, from school.

Simon, who works as a water filter salesman in the afternoons, said with the ups and downs of sales, the value of the cans is the one thing that stays constant.

Their 17-year-old daughter, Cynthia, a senior at Van Nuys High School, hopes to start college this fall, perhaps studying to become a pediatrician.

“Our children are ashamed that their parents work cleaning up other people’s cans,” Maria said in Spanish. “But I tell her there’s nothing wrong with it. We’re going to keep collecting cans for her education.”

tony.barboza@latimes.com