Strangers Spoil Recycling Plan

When my neighborhood received its yellow recycling bins, I thought it was great, especially since everyone on my block immediately filled them with clean plastic and glass bottles, cans and other recyclables.

Now, I’m not so sure it’s great. Now my neighborhood is host to roving groups of strangers pushing presumably stolen shopping carts overflowing with the recyclables they take from the yellow bins. Every week, I call the city sanitation number to report scavengers. No action is ever taken.

By now, scavengers hit our street twice a week--once the night before pickup, and again the next morning before the trucks come to collect. By the time the city arrives, there’s nothing to recycle.

These people, regardless of how unfortunate they are, are ripping off the city and the taxpayers who foot the bill for the bins and the fancy new automated trucks, dooming a much-needed program to certain failure.

All it would take to discourage scavenging would be enforcement of the no-scavenging regulation by an official car, driven by a uniformed city sanitation worker, cruising the streets offering warnings and writing citations. They would have to be only as enterprising as the scavengers themselves to determine which blocks have garbage and recycling pickups on which days.

Why pay to report ‘em if that’s where the buck stops? If cost is a factor, it could probably be accomplished by one guy on a bicycle.

I might as well take my bottles and cans to the next out-of-work homeless person I see at an off-ramp, but I’ve never seen a sign saying, “Will Recycle For Food.”

LISA WILLIAMS, Van Nuys