Letters: Recycling or robbery?

Re “An income hit for recyclers,” Jan. 19

The Times sympathetically portrays the plight of individuals who “earned an average of 7% of their income from returning bottles and cans.” For many cases, the word “returning” should be replaced with “stealing.”

I have been at many meetings in Los Angeles where residents complained about people fishing through their recycling bins and taking what should be going to the city. In some neighborhoods with recycling centers, residents have complained about people coming onto private property on non-collection days to look through their cans. This happened to me once, and I don’t live near a recycling center.

I have no problem with people looking through trash cans in public areas where the recyclables would not have been separated out. They are performing a public service while earning money.

However, taking the recyclables out of my blue bin in the middle of the night and making me afraid is not “earning” an income.

Connie Elliot

Studio City

When I was a kid in the 1950s, I heard stories of destitute people in developing countries so poor that they lived in garbage dumps. “How lucky I live in a rich country, where no one would be that hard up,” I thought.

And now I read that sixtysomething Vietnam veterans are scrounging enough cans to live.

Can this be Los Angeles? How many are desperate and penniless in this beautiful area?

Cheryl Clark

Long Beach

While I sympathize with some people who walk around on recycling day with shopping carts and bags to pick through containers, my sympathy ends when I see organized groups going through neighborhoods dumping their “catch” into pickup trucks.

To me this is akin to stealing hundreds of dollars from the fund intended to defray the cost of a recycling program, which seems to be working fairly well. Going unchecked, this could evolve into a fair-size business enterprise not intended by the program.

Lou Del Pozzo

Pacific Palisades

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