Increase in Recycling Has Hurt the Poor and Homeless

Determined to support his three sons, Bert Mamaril gets up at least once a week at 4 a.m. to begin the search for his modest booty: discarded bottles and aluminum cans.

Sometimes shivering in the cool, early morning darkness, he leans over smelly apartment dumpsters and shoves the trash around with his homemade cane: a four-foot-long mop handle with a wire hook at the end.

But lately, Mamaril--who uses the money he makes redeeming the containers to buy food and pay bills--has been finding fewer beverage containers because of rising buy-back rates that make it profitable for people with much more money than Mamaril to trade cans for cash.

Public policy and curbside recycling programs have succeeded in getting more people to recycle--ridding streets and parks of some trash. But inadvertently, the increased interest in recycling has hurt some of the poor and homeless.

Those who depend on redeeming cans to pay bills and to eat said they are making less money collecting recyclable trash from streets, dumpsters and parks. They are competing with more collectors--newspaper deliverers, milkmen, joggers, retirees--and some have been forced to change their habits to beat the competition. At least one man supplementing his pension now starts scouting two hours earlier than he used to, at 3:30 a.m.

“As recycling becomes more and more institutionalized and we establish the incentives within the economy. . .for recycling, there will be increasing competition between institutionalized recyclers and free-lance recyclers,” said Rod Miller, legislative director of Californians Against Waste, which fought for 10 years to persuade state lawmakers to pass a bottle redemption bill.

In addition, more people are recycling cans because of aluminum’s rising value and the higher redemption rates. Recycling centers now offer 60 cents to 95 cents a pound for aluminum. It takes about 26 cans to equal a pound.

“Normally, we see street people, trash pickers. Now we’re getting people pulling in with their Mercedes,” said Michael Bushman, co-owner of the California Public Recycling Center in Chatsworth.

At the Chatsworth recycling center, a homeless person might have collected about $20 a haul before the increased buy-back rates but now takes home about $8--even with the containers’ higher value, he said.

“I’ve seen a big influx of customers because of the increase in price and people still whine it’s not high enough,” Bushman said. “I’ve had people pulling cans from their Rolls-Royces. I was amazed. I was going, ‘What did these people need this for?’ ”

Both those who collect cans and those who just redeem their own containers said they have been seeing more collectors.

“Go to a park and they’re around all the time,” said Fred, a homeless 41-year-old who redeems his cans in Chatsworth. “You could sit on a bench and in the course of three hours find 10 people going by. Two years ago, there weren’t quite as many.”

Fred used to bring in 70 pounds of aluminum cans a week two years ago and take away $56. Now he brings in about 50 pounds and collects $45. Although he finds fewer cans, the increased value of the cans offsets part of his loss, Fred said.

Robert Isom, 78, said he doesn’t have to redeem cans to survive--he has a pension from General Motors--but collects them to “keep from sitting down and rolling my thumbs.”

Five days a week, he looks in apartment dumpsters, standing on tiptoes to hook cans with a 3-foot wire. He starts at 6:30 a.m., meets about 20 other collectors, and quits four hours later to redeem the cans. He uses that day’s money for lunch at a senior citizens center.

“I get up like I’m going to my job; I look for my cans,” said the Canoga Park man. “It’s almost fun to me after I worked at GM 32 years.”

Two years ago, Isom collected $60 a week from the cans, now he goes home with $40.

Judy Roumpf, publisher of Resource Recycling magazine, based in Oregon, said scavengers are a “large part” of the millions who recycle in the United States. About 61% of all aluminum cans sold are recycled, she said.

Roumpf said scavengers ask themselves “What’s worth my time?” and will adapt to changing recycling demands by looking for the most profitable types of trash. “Scavengers of 10, 15, 20 years ago were not chasing after aluminum cans,” she said.

Miller said there will always be people throwing away reusable material despite recycling programs. “I think there’s always going to be recyclable material in trash cans for the homeless to develop incomes. If we expect recycling to solve the problems with the homeless, we’re kidding ourselves.”

Recycling still solves part of Mamaril’s budget problems but less effectively than it did five months ago. He said his load of cans is 30 pounds lighter, and he collects about $30 a week less.

“If you have a family to feed, you have to have patience in picking cans,” Mamaril said. “You know there’s money there.”