My family used to do this all the time when we were kids. We'd go along the ditches on the side of the road and make a family outing of it on weekends. At the beach my brother and I would drag big plastic garbage bags around and collect as much as we could from people who were happy to help some kids out and also happy to be rid of the bottles and cans. You could make some decent coin at it, but that was also in the 80s when 5c a can and 10-20c a bottle was worth something.
It gets into your bones. Even today with 25 years software dev experience under my belt, I still feel the twitch whenever I see a discarded bottle or can.
I grew up in the same neighborhood as the writer, even went to the same college. It was normal that my family members collected cans. We all struggled to get by and that struggle is something that you will never forget. It keeps you grounded especially when you're in a tech industry that often forgets about how it is for people at the bottom of our society. Value that twitch and that feeling. I consider it sort of a lower brain stem function that reminds us of where we came from, what we had to do and why we have to be there for others going through the same.
My partner teases me about it but I collect every single can/bottle from my household and any other place I can find them and put them into trashbags in the trunk of my car. I often have no space to store other things in the trunk. When I'm back in my old neighborhood visiting family, I make it a point to stop and give these bags to individuals collecting. I know there are better ways to give back and donate but it's something that I will never stop doing because I know people appreciate reaching them on their level and letting them know we don't judge it, in fact we support it.
I read this with a smile. Collecting cans was my first money making venture as a 10yo, 80% of my life ago. ~1c/can (recycle value, no deposit), about $10/wk just cleaning up at 2 neighbourhood schools. I remember making my own 'can crushers' with a 2x4 and a brick. There was no shame in it, I felt much pride at that cash-in. The sickly sweet smell and soft clatter as the bag contents turned from aluminium to cash stays with me today.
I know what you mean. I used to walk around my school and the road for coins as a kid to pay for Advanced Placement (reduced cost) tests. I still instinctually reach for cash on the ground after a decade in software.
My mom worked at a university so after school I’d take the bus there and go to a few spots and collect bottles and cans, which gave me some money to go to the campus store and get a snack.
they might as well have posted on an article about growing up homeless living in a tent to talk about how they loved to sleep in tents, all the time, on the weekends when they were camping as a kid, much fun!
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be collected. It was kind of low-key charity of sorts.
At some point this just kind of dried up. I suspect it coincided with municipalities selling the rights to collect recyclables to waste management companies.
> It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people.
It was not just a past time amongst people of lower economic means. My dad was a computer science professor and when I was a little kid we would go on long walks around our rural town collecting cans and bottles littered along the road and in wooded areas. He seemed kind of into the money we would get back from the supermarket, but I doubt he really cared about it that much. Maybe he was trying to teach me the value of the dollar/work. Maybe he was into the peaceful adventure of it. Or maybe he cared a tiny bit about the environment. It was probably a bit of all of that. Whatever it was, I remember that there were other people who did it too of all social classes that you would see at the supermarket recycling center. I'm not sure why people stopped. Maybe as others have pointed out, municipal recycling trucks have made people less enthusiastic about it.
It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always gives me a familiar feeling.
Actually, this article is about New York, so there should be a deposit there too, which explains why it's feasible.
I've always been surprised that other states do not have bottle returns inside stores. What I used to routinely do in Michigan -- bring some cans with me to the grocery store -- I have never done in California, since you have to travel to a recycling center with limited hours.
Yeah, returns in stores is what's done in Norway as well and while varying over time return rates have regularly been around 95%.
It's structured as a tax on single-use containers that retailers can buy themselves free from based on the proportion they can demonstrate returns for, coupled with a shared recycling scheme they can join.
In practice it means you can return containers wherever you can buy them, and most larger grocery stores have machines to handle returns. (In fact, the largest manufacturer of "reverse vending machines" for bottles is Norwegian TOMRA).
Recycling rates in places without bottle returns in stores basically shows that just having recycling centres or even curb-side recycling from home is woefully insufficient if you're serious about dealing with plastic waste.
I don't understand it either. It gets people to clean up litter and gives a lot of small handouts as rewards for keeping the state clean. There's probably overhead we don't see as consumers but it seems pretty beneficial to me.
In the San Francisco Bay area, collecting cans is still very common among the homeless. In some parts of SF people will dig through your recycling (and garbage) every garbage day for recycling. Additionally, many public garbage cans have a semi-open section at the top which I have seen used for disposing of cans. I don't know if it's intentionally designed that way, but it's much easier for anyone to get the cans from this section vs the trash barrel itself.
If you leave your trash out the night before, someone will come by, slit the bags open and remove anything made of metal. They will leave your trash in your yard.
Most garbage cans (at least those in dense areas) in my town of Calgary have a little shelf along the top that can hold cans/bottles. I can't see them being used for anything other than holding cans for collection. In Alberta, there is a deposit for all beverage containers (milk, juice, beer, wine, pop/cola etc) so there are a lot of people that collect for a living. Where I grew up (Ontario), there is only a deposit on beer and wine, not juice/milk/pop etc.
Doesn’t matter. The redemption cost is paid by the consumer when they buy the can—it is literally added to the bill, like a sales tax. Any recyclable value is extra.
Can collecting has been wildly popular over here in Portland OR for as long as I can remember. Basically no cans that are set on the curb ever last long enough to get picked up by waste management. Typically it's homeless people who collect them but there's also enterprising immigrant families and seemingly people from other walks of life who do it, some who try to collect at more industrial scale by filling their cars with cans.
Here is a story of a man who collected cans and bottles for cash and invested the money he got in the stock market, he died a millionaire.
"Curt Degerman, known to many as "Tin Can Curt," Degerman spent nearly 30 years roaming the streets of Skelleftea in northern Sweden collecting tin cans and bottles for cash. Those who passed him by simply assumed he was another ordinary street bum.
But to the surpise of many, when Degerman died in 2008, he left more than $1.4 million to his cousin. In between collecting cans, Degerman spent a lot of time in his local library reading business papers and studying the stock market. "
He knew stocks inside and out," said his cousin.
By immersing himself in an education of thrift and smart investing, Degerman used his tin-can earnings to purchase mutual funds. He bought 124 gold bars and also expanded his cash with a savings account. By riding a bicycle and not having a mortgage on his house, his savings were made even easier.
But in 2008, Degerman died of a heart attack, leaving his entire estate to a cousin who had visited him regularly during his last days. He died a millionaire."
I remember reading some version of the story where he figured out what companies were on the rise by going through peoples trash. Like he would make note of what people were actually buying so he had an inside track.
"Jessica is a proud first-generation Ecuadorian-American and a second-year Percy Ellis Sutton Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) student at Baruch College majoring in business management with a minor in law and policy."
Jessia is the American dream. First generation, got to college and writing like that.
Lots of Americans concentrate on what is wrong with America. There is value in that but it's really important to remember that America is still a place where immigrants can come and they or their children will really make it.
Good on them.
(BTW. I am not an American but I did live and work there.)
The only people complaining are rich privileged people who get into top colleges because of daddy and mommy. Source: know a bunch of such people.
Good thing about wealth generation is ultimately these low level buffoons get weeded out, they will never break past the low millions. They never knew real hardship so they can only go so far.
First of all, I'm replying to someone. So, that implies you don't understand context.
Read the parent I replied to, then read what I wrote. Sure, me using "THE ONLY PEOPLE" is a bit strong, but unless you're a machine you would understand the context.
Is working 12 hours a day so you can afford to live what you’d describe as doing “very well”?
I don’t know why you decided to compare immigrants to natives. I made no such distinction. Nobody, immigrant or not, should have to work 12 hours a day just to survive.
Exactly. And this story will be used to harm. Ppl will say „look they can just get out and collect cans from the side of the road“. I had a high school teacher that vilified ppl on welfare and said this. My parents and my siblings did this and my parents especially my mother and me are scarred by precarity. I hate the these stories they just do harm.
Not only that, but when she graduates, she might not be able to get a well-paying job and subsequently find a home. She may well be living below the level of a factory worker from the 60s.
Did the electrician or garbage truck driver who's parents came from just as much not also make it?
Why is it implied in so many comments around here that anyone who didn't go to college and get a white collar job pushing papers/code/spreadsheets didn't make it?
You're the one who, when trying to come up with examples of people who other people would think haven't made it, came up with electricians and garbage truck drivers.
What are you arguing here? That all people are equally comfortable and all jobs are equally good, and that implying that suffering is bad is demeaning to the people who suffer? It's like upside-down wokeness. While some people are arguing to put in wheelchair ramps, this is like instead insisting that implying that wheelchair users can't walk as well as everyone else is prejudiced.
My point is that it's unrealistic to expect people to go from refugee to hedge fund manager in one generation. Refugee to stable blue collar is reasonable.
The "average techie" income curve is generally shifted higher than the "average electrician" bell curve though the shapes are different and there's some close areas and intersections.
It's not a "problem" per se, it's unskilled, untrained labor and someone with no resources trying to make it.
Not all hard work gets a reward.
Not everyone has a happy ending.
While statistically, you have a better chance of making a "high" salary in the USA, it really also depends on what you do and who you know.
Picking up cans also sounds like they could be undocumented, with no "legal" work papers.
Many times, it would/could be better for someone to stay in their "origin" country and live a regular life, but at the same time, you have to think - "would many people that have a network and a "career" leave everything they have, uproot their close family and go to another country, where even the language is different to pick up cans?
Is that sacrafrice? Is it worth it? Is it even legal? (lols)
As shown with "amiga" in the article - the authors parents also do not know English.
The same happens with many "normal" Americans as well. The ones that are illiterate, have a poor network of friends, uneducated, etc. While we don't hear about it as often, it's pitted away as more depressing/their own fault because "they were born in the USA anyway."
--
Nothing against the author, but it reads as poverty porn. Great she accepts herself, and isn't ashamed, and while we may all think she should wear it as a badge of honor - in reality, the more socially distanced you appear to your peers, the more you are.
Your comment is a sobering economic reality of what it's like for immigrants, documented and undocumented, and even putting aside the huge cultural adjustments.
We're biased in tech because we see H1-B visa holders living a comfortable life, even with lower wages. However, this is an outlier in current, and certainly prior, immigrant stories. Immigrating to a new country is downright hard. Many times it's unskilled, but also, at least in the Western countries, it's an issue of unrecognized skills that makes things difficult. My father had an EE degree and certifications from his home country, but the US, where we immigrated, didn't recognize them. He had to work in lower skilled jobs in electronics for years because of this.
I remember going can scavenging with him to supplement household income. It was a decent way to put food on the table back in the early 80's.
I think the one bit you've not covered here is the children. While the parents likely will live a life of difficulty and work, their children become part of the American education pipeline that makes it quite likely they will be, if nothing else, integrated into society in a manner that will make their taking the next upward class step much easier. The parents are taking the hit to their livelihoods and careers to enable the next generation to be more successful. It's not a guarantee, but probably more upward mobility here.
You may find some books on the economic history of the US interesting.
I suspect Jessica's parents immigrated and have very little formal education. Possible causes: trade liberalization means low skill workers in the US are competing with similar workers across the entire world. Simultaneously: 10th, 25th, and even median wages have barely moved in well over 20 years. Many of the jobs previously open to unskilled people willing to work very hard are no longer done in the US. A large shift of economic growth to capital over labor (which is, btw, the result of deliberate policy choices).
I think it’s important to consider how we got here, but I think it’s more important to consider what we can do about it. Many social policies could make life easier for people like Jessica and her family.
I don't think you can think about what to do in any serious way without understanding how we got here. Including American attitudes towards the social policies you're likely thinking of.
Or, if you take another section of the rest of the world wait till you realize what's happening in the rest of the world where people work less hard and don't have it that bad.
That is a much smaller slice of the world than the opposite.
Even the poor in the U.S. are still better off than most people in the rest of the world. The U.S. can certainly do better addressing income inequality, but there still needs to be some perspective as to the relative opportunity available to people in the U.S. compared to most other places.
FYI a great many immigrants were rich when they immigrated. A lot of rich people come to America because America offers so much opportunity to people who are already wealthy. Immigrants from overseas are especially likely to be wealthy. Indian-Americans are the wealthiest ethnic demographic in America simply because migrating from India pretty much requires being very wealthy to begin with.
Nothing I said indicated the immigrants were rich or poor, the majority are poor though.
My point was if there's a nicer system than the US, immigrants will be flocking there too.
Luckily we have numbers on the rates of which people immigrate to which countries, and the average wages of citizens of those countries.
> Indian-Americans are the richest ethnic minority in America because migrating from India pretty much requires being wealthy.
Plenty of lower class Indian immigrants pool their money for taxi medallions, convenient stores, hotels, trucks, etc. to get a business going.
They integrate well and know how to climb the system. They send their children in as doctors later in generations. They don't always start rich, they work for it.
> A lot of rich people come to America because America treats rich people so well, at the cost of treating poor people like dirt. See: tax rates.
You'll find tax rates are better in the US than most other countries for lower income families. For businesses the US has only recently been competitive.
> Plenty of lower class Indian immigrants pool their money for taxi medallions, convenient stores, hotels, trucks, etc. to get a business going.
Are there many "lower class Indian immigrants" who arrived in the past 30 years? The immigration system since the 90s has raised the barrier for Indians so high that the idea of 'lower class Indian immigrants' seems difficult to parse. I disagree with the assertion that Indians have to be very wealthy to immigrate - highly educated/qualified, yes. The era when an Indian taxi driver could immigrate ended many decades ago.
I'm genuinely curious how this is the case. Every desi person I see working in the jobs you mentioned has usually turned out to be Bangladeshi or Pakistani - For every Indian Uber driver, I've gotten 5 Pakistani ones. I'm in NYC, which has a large South Asian population. The city is quite tolerant of undocumented immigrants, so I'd expect undocumented Indians to occupy some significant fraction of those jobs as well. Yet even Indian restaurants here are mostly staffed by Bangladeshis.
What? That's not the case at all. Like anywhere in the world, education in India is definitely more accessible to the privileged. However, the Indian educational system has a mandatory quota for the traditionally marginalized groups, and higher education is essentially free. Yes, there are issues around accessibility to education for the most disadvantaged groups, but to suggest that a "lower caste" Indian needs to win a lottery (whatever that means) to get a decent education is just not true. The current system reserves about 50% of educational seats at the very best institutions for various marginalized groups (including the differently abled). A kid from a marginalized group that has at least average grades is almost guaranteed a college education, for free. A bright kid from one of these groups is very likely to get into the very best engineering/medical/research institutions. Of course, it not all smooth sailing after that, and discrimination is a real problem. I would still disagree that the chances for a decent education are anywhere comparable to winning a lottery.
> They integrate well and know how to climb the system. They send their children in as doctors later in generations. They don't always start rich, they work for it.
And from this article, we can see Ecuadorians follow a similar path. The integrate well, and climb the system by sending their sons and daughters to college where they can build a better life for themselves than their parents had.
> Indian-Americans are the wealthiest ethnic demographic in America simply because migrating from India pretty much requires being very wealthy to begin with.
Most Indian immigrants come from middle class, not poor or rich backgrounds. They are privileged enough to have access to educational opportunities that give them the skills to emigrate, but privileged enough to not have a reason to emigrate.
So how much do you want to pay for bottle collecting? When you say "the US has the resources to reward hard workers", in this case you mean everybody who buys a bottle should pay more. Or how would you envision it to play out?
We could easily turn bottle-collecting into a job with guaranteed hours and pay.
Bottle-collecting is a poor example for the broader issue I was discussing. Those programs are intended for the (mostly homeless) poor to pick up trash they see instead of leaving it behind. It does what it's supposed to do.
Many places use a deposit system, where if you return the packaging for recycling, you get your money back. This cuts down on litter, at no cost to those who recycle.
But presumably, the higher the price for returning bottles, the less likely people will be to just dump them on the street, for the collectors to collect?
Or it will become attractive for more collectors. In any case, it may not be so simple to raise their "wage" for collecting bottles.
> The US has the resources to reward hard workers with financial stability.
Most hard workers in the U.S. are rewarded with financial stability. Not everyone, but enough that people still flock here from other countries where that's less true.
> It also benefits from brain-draining other countries with this promise.
Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.
> Most hard workers in the U.S. are rewarded with financial stability. Not everyone, but enough that people still flock here from other countries where that's less true.
You think restaurant workers are lazy? Factory workers? Amazon fulfillment workers?
Why do people need two or three exhausting jobs to make a living?
> Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.
I don't know what this means. Have the courage to say what you mean instead of using sarcasm.
Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
> Why do people need two or three exhausting jobs to make a living?
Most. Not all. The U.S. can still do better, but there needs to be some perspective on how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world. Better than most countries, not as good as some.
> Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
Brain drain sounded to me like the U.S. attracting those people is a bad thing, because those people should stay in their own countries. That's not what you meant to imply?
We do need educated workers to fill the jobs you describe, but at the same time we probably send too many young people to college, many of whom would do better with solid technical skills training leading directly to jobs with far less debt.
From a US perspective, braining other countries' brains is good. I understand the term is negative, but I didn't mean it that way.
We don't need to ask how the US stacks up against the rest of the world -- only our economic peers. Compared to many Western European countries and Canada, we are not investing our excess resources as well into social safety.
I'm not a socialist and don't support UBS, but the floor of poverty in the US needs to be much higher (for all our sakes).
OP argued that US is so great, since it allows immigrants to "make it" by collecting trash. It is exactly this type of smugness, false positivism and immigrant exploitation I hate.
People should not be ashamed for not owning a house. But they should also know that chance to buy a house for unqualified worker in NY is 0.001%. If there is a realistic view of situation in US, they may stay at their home country.
Why attend college at all? By going to college, she's implying that people who haven't gone to college don't have exactly the same opportunities and security as anyone else. She's the real snob.
So you need to own a couple houses or businesses to be considered one who made it? I don’t have one of either, but I am somewhere where I feel I made it. Less of a safety net than if I owned a house of business, but then again those are too expensive to be pursued with no attention to alternatives and also provide a very porous shield from the crises.
Ah yes the good old, being poor is a character flaw. There's plenty of evidence that being poor is primarily due to nothing else but lack of money. But the rich/middle class love to feel superior by saying people are poor because of bad financial decisions.
I'm not saying it's a character flaw. I'm saying they held onto a job that wasn't optimal based on their other available options. They could have been middle class had they chosen another job. Down right negligent honestly since they clearly had no healthcare that entire time. One illness could have thrown them on the street.
Actually.... Yea. In this case that's exactly what's happening. It's like if you got a job at McDonald's working minimum wage when you were 16 but then you never moved on.
When customizing their character, they should have chosen a different profession than "garbage picker" on the selection screen. To be honest, I really don't know how they found it - I didn't see garbage picker on the menu at all, and I don't even know any garbage pickers.
Michigander here. One of the very few states in the USA with a bottle deposit. 10 cents per can/bottle. It's actually prohibited to put a bottle or can in a landfill here.
It's very common to see people digging through trash cans and such, collecting bottles and cans to return for deposit. We have two garbage cans in the garage at home, when they both fill up we will take them back to the store. It's a inconvenience to go to the grocery store, wait in line for 20 minutes, then feed all the returnables into the machine, wait for the store staff to empty the machine so you can finish, and then turn the ticket in for eight dollars.
People in line become impatient and just give their bags of cans to anyone else in line who will take them. Then you get the odd bottles that aren't returnable at that store, because they don't sell that brand.
Part of the deal is the automated machines are not very fast. In the old days, a clerk counted them by hand or you just gave them a full 12/24 pack case. There aren't many machines, either. Another problem is if you return them to a small convenience store, the staff won't give you money back, they insist on only store credit, not cash refund. Which I'm pretty sure is against the law.
I have a recycle bin in my office, overflowing with empty aluminum cans of Monster, plastic bottles of Mt Dew, and glass kombucha bottles. I always tell the cleaning guy he can have them. There's a social stigma attached to carrying a bag of bottles through the office and out to my car. There might be 3 or 4 dollars worth in there, so who cares.
Lots of charities have bottle drives, sometimes one of the parents will collect them for their school sports teams, and there's a dropoff for the local 4th of July fireworks show.
Also, when COVID first started, we couldn't return bottles for over 6 months. This lead to some pretty impressive amounts of bottles being kept at peoples homes.
In Germany the machines just print out a slip of paper with a barcode that can be used to get cash back at the register, or as store credit. The machines compact the plastic, and are fairly quick. On your way in, you just pop them in and go shopping. If more states had the bottle deposit, it would be easier to handle.
Those machines exist here in the US as well. Every grocer or store around me with bottle and can recycling machines operate identically, and are redeemed identically.
My father was illiterate, which left him very few options in life after spending his early 20s in prison for check fraud. During the 70s, he discovered he could pick up cardboard and recyclables from local shops and grocery stores and take them to the nearby recycling plant for decent money.
By the early 90s, when I was a young teenager, he would use me as free labor and I'd spend my weekends crushing cans piled as mountains the size of pickup trucks. You'd have to remember to empty the can first, otherwise old beer or worse would get everywhere and you'd go home smelling like a chain-smoking drunk. The only redeeming quality was getting to see all the different brands and can designs and dreaming about how they might taste from their lingering aromas.
We did this work on borrowed land in Tulalip, a local Indian reservation where he had made friends offering pickup recycling services. One early summer after a particularly grueling day, my dad handed me $10 and we made our way over to Tulalip's "Boom City", an open-air market of stalls selling fireworks of every imaginable kind. It was like heaven to me, the air filled with tiny explosions and the smell of spent fireworks while crowds palpable with excitement wandered among the two dozen stalls.
I had my heart set on a brick of Black Cat firecrackers, but my allowance only got me half way there. When the stall owner noticed my dad, he threw me the brick. "Oh, you're Ron's son. Just give me what you have." I couldn't believe my luck. After we got home, I called my best friend to let him know about my bounty and that I was coming over to share. I would never get there.
A few blocks from my destination I came across a yard sale, and as was habit spent a few minutes browsing things I could never afford. Most of it was your usual old housewares and used clothing, but among it all sat an old Apple II with a detached 5.25 drive. I'd only ever used a computer at school, and even then just during free time in the library playing "Oregon Trail" or "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?"
"I'll trade you" came a voice as I gawked mouth-ajar at the computer, and I looked over to find a man pointing at my brick of firecrackers.
When I got home and booted it up, I was greeted with the ">" prompt of Apple DOS 3.3 and no idea what to do next. In my excitement I recalled the seller had told me to type "loderunner", and the rest is history.
It blows my mind that a summer crushing cans, a brick of fireworks, and an old Apple II led me out of poverty. I was so ashamed at what my parents did growing up, but realize now they were doing the best they could under the circumstances. It's so easy to look at someone else and judge them, and assume they're the victim of their own laziness rather than complicated people with complicated histories and complicated situations.
My life wouldn't be the same if my poor, uneducated father hadn't been kind to his customers, a stall owner that was kind to a kid, and someone throwing a yard sale that saw the value of his old stuff in the hands of someone new.
My father was able to get into computers and video games during the microcomputer boom of the 70s because my GRANDFATHER repaired televisions on the side for extra money, so the house had all the tools for my dad to take people's broken machines, repair them, and use them. This led him to learn basic (and BASIC ha) programming, which helped him get a decent accounting job.
In turn, when I was born in the 80s, we had a computer and, even though neither of my parents were college-educated (in fact, my mother was a high school drop out), my dad could explain programming well enough that I understood and was able to find out I was good at it/really enjoyed it + I grew up in a tinkering household that encouraged experimentation, repair, and tool use.
And now those skills are the main reason I don't have to worry about poverty. Because in the 1940s and 1950s my grandfather fell in love with televisions. That's just luck.
The older I get the more I realise the fortunes in my life have such a basis in luck, a chance encounter here, a conversation that led to a shared topic there. So much of my life is based on one or two lucky chances I had, and I know that my life could have taken a very different turn, it is humbling to think about.
> It's so easy to look at someone else and judge them, and assume they're the victim of their own laziness rather than complicated people with complicated histories and complicated situations.
I understand what you mean from an emotional stand point, but isn't it odd we can think of someone crushing pick up size mountains of cans to make a buck as "lazy"?
In retrospect, your dad was obviously busting his butt and hustling to make some honest money as best he could, and that deserves our admiration.
Awesome story. My computer career started when our school got an Apple II. I skipped classes to use it, with hindsight failing the other classes but learning how to program set me up for life. Good on you for sacrificing your fireworks.
Here in Norway a half litre or smaller container has a deposit of 2 kr, bigger containers are 3 kr (22 and 33 US cent respectively).
But it isn't the size of the deposit that drives the return rate (95% or more here in Norway) it is the ease of doing it.
Here all shops that sell such goods are required to accept the containers in return even if they were not purchased in that shop and even if they are of a different brand.
So every supermarket has a reverse vending machine [1] where you deposit the bottles and cans and get a receipt that you can exchange for money or goods at the till.
Saw that at your neighboor's in Copenhagen, and after the first outrage of paying +50cts per drink, I understood that I was seeing a glimpse the future… If littering is equivalent to throwing money, you simply won't do it.
Weird side-effect: homeless people might ask for your empty bottle and do the collection. Not sure how I feel about that though…
> Weird side-effect: homeless people might ask for your empty bottle and do the collection. Not sure how I feel about that though…
It becomes a respectful cooperation. When you party in a park, you place your containers next to a trash so a homeless can pick it up without searching the trash. They basically help you partying hard (and not caring/carrying about the bottles) and earn (by hard work) a bit of money.
In Germany -at least the cities I'm familiar with- everyone places their cans and bottles next to the trash-can.
German bottles often have "pfand gehört daneben" (Deposits belong next to it) printed on them[0]. And some cities even placed special holders alongside the trashcans[1].
Like with many things, Germans have made deposit collection into an efficient job.
The only issue is that glass bottles are too cheap and heavy.
They should at least have a 25 cent deposit as well. Right now no homeless person picks those up, because it's just not worth it.
Even with 25 cents there would still be a disincentive due to the weight, but I also don't want to incentivize bottle makers to produce more plastic, for them to lower the price at the counter.
Single-use containers are 25 cents, indeed, but a lot of the stuff you will buy is multi-use, and there things vary. Multi-use plastic bottles and large glass bottles usually have a 15 cents deposit, and small beer glass bottles it is only 8 cents, unless they have a clip-lock (Flensburger e.g.) then it's 15 cents again. Vine bottles are extremely confusing, ranging from no deposit, to 2 or 3 cents, to 15 cents.
I saw a lot of bottle collector people skip glass bottles, in particular beer bottles. I live close to a minor league football (soccer) stadium that also hosts the local American Football team and various other events, and bottle collectors are a constant sight before, during and after the games and events. The two closest city tram stops are quite often still littered all over with multi-use beer bottles even days after, because bottle collectors do not like those things. Too heavy and bulky at only 8 cents. People "litter" deliberately, being told the bottle collector people will be happy and thankful for the easy collection...
If I remember correctly, this difference in deposit amount was justified by reasoning lower multi-use deposits compared to single-use deposits would drive the adoption of multi-use. I don't think it has done that much, not really. When single-use deposits became a thing, a lot of single-use containers vanished completely, but once the collection systems got established a lot of it just returned.
I personally would outlaw most types of single-use containers, especially for "cold" beverages, and actually make the deposits all the same amount. That would have a far better and greater impact than bickering about outlawing plastic straws, at the very least. And a glass beer bottle might be worth picking up if it's 25 cents you get for it instead of 8.
> Single-use containers are 25 cents, indeed, but a lot of the stuff you will buy is multi-use, and there things vary. Multi-use plastic bottles and large glass bottles usually have a 15 cents deposit, and small beer glass bottles it is only 8 cents, unless they have a clip-lock (Flensburger e.g.) then it's 15 cents again. Vine bottles are extremely confusing, ranging from no deposit, to 2 or 3 cents, to 15 cents.
To add to all of that confusion; Some brands of yogurt in glass jars also have a deposit on them, while most other yogurt glasses don't.
Right, indeed. Glass jars (usually) have a deposit when they are "multi-use", while single-use plastic containers (and some single-use glass ones) do not. I lost many euros thanks to that, because I didn't know for a long time, and dumped my yogurt glass jars into the normal glass collection containers. It would have been easy to collect the deposits, since I am doing that for all the bottles I use anyway. :P
Glass bottles are 8 cents, if they are re-use.
Re-use glass bottles with a clip closure are 15 cent (and there are still some other kind of bottles with 15 cent).
If they are only single use, they are 25 cents (e.g. beer from Lidl).
> Most glass is mostly sand, an abundant raw material.
Sand is not actually an abundant raw material [0]. Although sand in general is abundant, sand that is usable for construction and manufacturing is generally found on beaches and flood-plains - desert sand is less angular and usable. We extract 50 billion tonnes of sand per year and this is getting worse as a result of continued massive urbanisation. Ocean dredging for sand has significant ecological input.
This might not be why glass recycling started, but it suggests an incentive for continuing to do so.
Garbage collectors don't want to handle glass when it's mixed in with the other waste. So it is already collected separately. Might as well recycle it.
Yeah, most people are considerate enough to either take their bottles with them or put them somewhere where they can be collected easily, as you wrote. And, even if beer bottles only have 8 cents deposit, are heavy, stinky and the remaining beer may run out, they do get collected sometimes. But, to avoid the impression that in Germany everything works perfectly, I should also mention the (maybe fewer) others, who don't care about the 8 cents and simply smash the bottles on the sidewalk for "fun". As a cyclist, I have a special love for this second category...
Yeh until the machines reject your four crates of beer for no reason and you’re in that limbo of “do I care about €10 enough to lug these to another edeka or not” ;)
I remember asking a German friend why people were leaving the bottles on top of the bins when we went to a football match.
Growing up in Scotland collecting Irn Bru bottles was something you could do for "sweetie" money. I was disappointed the last time I looked to find out that they have now decommissioned their bottle cleaning plant. Apparently conventional recycling has resulted in the rate of return being too low.
They are planning to bring it back in Scotland, as a more univeral scheme like the GP descirbes in Norway. The timeline keeps getting pushed back due to lobbying from the drinks industry though: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/14/scotland-del...
It can become a disrespectful cooperation as well.
I’ve had people rummage through recycling bin for cans and leaving a mess, I’ve seen fights over who gets to collect cans, and I’ve seen trespassing to collect cans from people’s private porches.
When collecting cans goes from a lucrative hobby to a business, problems arise.
i have seen some trash cans in Oslo with a separate cylinder for bottles that gives easy access to the bottles. I hope this becomes more popular, so that they don't have to dig through the trash cans.
I don't know about "respectful" for both parties. Bottle collectors trying to take/steal not yet empty bottles and cans has become more of a rule than an exception in parks in central Stockholm.
I'm still very much in favour of container deposit but I'm growing really tired of forceful collecting.
The people you're referring to are likely not the same kind of people who collect bottles in other countries.
My friend has this jokish ticks screaming out "Min pant"(roughly translates into "my cans) when we're a bit drunk, referring to this exact problem. It's inappropriate to go into further detail than to say he's not making fun of any Swedes.
It's one of the downsides of free movement within the EU when you're a country that's built on assuming most people will do right for themselves, the it breaks.
I see such behavior here in Germany sometimes, too. Like everywhere else in life, there are nice bottle collectors, and there are assholes.
One collector gave me a sticky, wet butt, because he snuck up behind us in a park, "stole" my half empty beer bottle I placed next to me, and then proceeded to empty it out right there. It was one of the very few times I had trouble controlling myself not to hit somebody... I managed to control myself in the end enough to avoid violence, but was still angry enough to call the cops on the guy. Cops told him to not show up in the park or surrounding parks for the rest of the day, and when they asked if I wanted to press charges (technically it was theft and damage of property), the collector waved a 20 Euro note for "cleaning costs", which I took instead. I felt that was punishment enough.
Then again, there is plenty of bottle collectors who are rather polite, and humbly ask if you're done with the bottle and if they can have it. And a lot of people also gather together their empty bottles in a pile when they see a collector approaching.
I'm quite disappointed you didn't press charges to he honest, (s)he must've understood perfectly what (s)he was doing and the consequences, yet he still did it. And you're likely not the only person abused like that.
Yes there are loads of nice appreciative collectors and they are doing us a service, it's just sad when the predators come and ruin it.
My hope was that involving the cops was scary enough (they took down the details of that person, and issued a formal order to vacate), and that the immediate monetary "punishment" in form of those 20 bucks (which is a lot of bottles) helped too. I felt it was a reasonable severe response to what happened. Causing that guy a lot of legal trouble, aside from clogging up the legal system with not even 20 bucks worth of damages, seemed unreasonable.
Those cops are also regularly working that area (they in fact were already in the park when I called, and I had seen them before doing their rounds), and if that bottle collector violated their order to vacate, it would have had actual consequences. And if he pulls the same shit again, the cops will have a "you again moment", and probably mention that to the next person who makes a complaint and at the very least issue a much longer order to vacate. And since they didn't mention anything to me, I am assuming it was the first time the cops were called on that guy, and we Germans have a tendency to call the cops quite often ;)
It also saved me from a lot of hassle myself, of course, not having to go to the police to give a signed statement, maybe show up in court, etc.
All these deposits are so low. Germany has 25 cent on non-beer plastic bottles.
Which means when buying a 1,5 liters bottle of water, the bottle is worth more (25 cent) than the water in it (19 cent).
Bottle collectors are quite common, haven't met any rude ones myself, but they are even speed-collecting trough the trash cans of trains stopped making stops at the station.
The prices are in Danish crowns, and aren't that far away from the German ones, although some consideration should be made for the higher cost of living here.
> homeless people might ask for your empty bottle and do the collection
I lived in Alberta 10 years ago and this was totally a thing. One homeless guy hung around the apartment and if you were carrying drink containers he would come and say "Can I take them to the store for you?". Of course, he meant could he get the deposit money on them too. He would hang around until he could fill two or three large garbage bags then head off to the return center to collect the deposit money. In all the time I lived there, I never found out where the actual return center was as I never needed to. The few $ involved was no loss to me (or anyone else in the apartment) but went towards the homeless guy being able to buy food. Never once did he seem drunk or high so he really did seem to be doing it to get food. I would see other guys like him walking along the street with garbage bags of bottles too, so it appeared to be the thing they did and it seemed to work out for everyone as I spoke to lots of people who said they also had a local homeless person that did the same at their apartments.
When I lived in Brazil there was no reliable municipal recycling in my city, and no bottle deposit, so instead of throwing paper, cans and bottles into the common garbage, we just left it properly separated at the door and a homeless guy with a cart would pick it up weekly and get it recycled.
They were pretty much running a public utility service I'd otherwise have to pay for with taxes.
> If littering is equivalent to throwing money, you simply won't do it.
I have learnt that when organising events at work (sponsored by workplace), you have to charge people. Any amount like €5, its two cups of coffee but turn-up rate is in high 90% of people that paid upfront. Without charging any money its 50-60%
The number of people that sign up were pretty similar, so I hazard a guess that risk aversion was at play.
> Weird side-effect: homeless people might ask for your empty bottle and do the collection. Not sure how I feel about that though…
It becomes an alternative form of giving them your change, and you conveniently don't have to carry the bottle home. Although I've lived in a city where an old lady was known to roam the parks and was very pushy about wanting you to surrender your bottles.
Some years ago, New York passed a law on recycling. For some reason, people seemed to be surprised when it turned out that those showing up at the grocery store with carts full of recyclables were neither lawyers nor stock traders, but rather the homeless.
in California there are fewer dropoffs in stores but the bottles tend to come from residential recycling bins, which were raided while they were waiting for a truck to pick them up.
In my experience, that's common, but so is people jumping your fence to raid your cans before you've put them out. And, should you ever try to recoup the 'deposit' by going to the recycling center, you'll spend 1+ hour in line being hounded by homeless people to give them your cans.
All of it creates way more incentive to just throw your cans in the trash so you don't have to deal with any of that.
Bay Area here. My experience at recycling centers has always been quick and painless. Took over 60 lbs of cans and a bunch of scrap copper the other week. No line, no hounding.
My experiences in Monterey (2015) and San Diego (2019) were negative. It is good to hear that the particular issue either is not universal or has improved with time.
It's still a positive, at least if the recycling system works similar to in the EU.
Here, food containers have fairly strict limits on what recycled waste can be used to make them. Returned bottles and cans are clean enough to be made into new food packaging, but ordinary household recycling waste is not.
I am not a rich man but the homeless guy needs the 50 cents more than I do.
And I rather have homeless people collect cans than making street music to be honest...
While I don't see a connection between homeless people and street musicians, I am intrigued by your complaint of the street musicians?
My kids are fascinated by them, and as long as they are not taking up too much space to make it impossible to pass through the street (and if they do, I'll happily pass through their "stage"), I am quite happy to have the streets livened up by some music too. Not all of it is good or to my taste, but it certainly beats empty streets, especially so during cold winter months.
They block the shopping streets and their music is terrible. There are no empty streets in the Netherlands on a Saturday and there is nothing more depressing than a Eastern European on an accordion.
Btw, here in Serbia (what you'd probably call Eastern Europe :), accordions are pretty rare (I guess they all went to Netherlands :)) other than in gypsy bands (but they rarely play in the streets other than when following weddings around), but violins (usually students), keyboards and guitars (number one, duh) are most common, but you get to hear a trumpet or a flute too. We are just classy like that (or there might be a musical school or two nearby in the part of Belgrade I see them in ;).
Eastern European music schools , and particular those with folklore specialties, have had a long history of master classes. It is often that one can find street talent with proper education, just because music industry pays very little in Eastern Europe.
It seems to me that in Western Europe you find mostly dégénérâtes and hippies with no formal music education at all.
One can know the difference
only if he has lived in Eastern Europe.
Perhaps the better Eastern European accordion players stay home. I used to visit Krakow often on business and really enjoyed listening to musicians playing in the main square. Also it wasn't just accordion players, there were all sorts, amateurs, music students, professional musicians playing a wide variety of instruments and styles.
It was worth having some cash to put in the bucket.
The machine is completely optional and just there to save time if they get a lot of deposits. They can handle it manually if they want to.
There is a limit to how large the deposit can be for stores without a machine. If you come with a big trash bag with bottles/cans, they have the right to refuse and refer you to a place with a machine (most grocery stores have machines)
Well, not everyone needs to do a reverse vending machine. Just hand them back to the cashier and he returns you money. Goes that far that when a restaurant sells a full bottle they need to take it back.
We have this system also in Germany since the late 80s (I think) and it works very well. Current incentive ranges from 8ct (beer glass bottles ... beer lobby always has exceptions ;)) to 25ct (plastic bottles)
The lightweight plastic ones are "Einweg" ("single use"), and the deposit is to get the material back for recycling - as long as the deposit label will scan, it's accepted. It's easier to scan them in the automats if they're not crushed; my German husband does not seem to have fully internalized this, so I reinflate them when they get rejected.
Glass bottles (beer, juice, milk and yoghurt) are "Mehrweg" ("multi-use"), and they actually want a bottle to sterilize and reuse (preferably with metal lid in the case of the milk and joghurt bottles), so if it's broken, it's technically trash and should go in the Altglas (old glass) containers you see at least once in every city neighborhood.
My experience in MI* is that a fair number of stores can be rather sticky about returns - "we don't sell that brand", "did you buy it here?", "come back when the machine is fixed", etc.
Conveniently, I live in a large-enough urban area to just take my business elsewhere.
At least where I am in Norway, there are far more grocery stores, but they're all smaller. So there are, relative to the US, fewer pure "convenience" stores, and more small groceries. Not sure if this holds true everywhere, but thought it added some context to your question.
Same in Germany, there is also the "Pfand gehört daneben" (Deposit [bottles] belong next [to the trashcan]) campaign, often with bottle holder on the trash can.
The whole deposit system is extremely convenient when you are drinking in the park or beach, where you usually don't want to bring all the bottles back again, but you'll get people coming by and ask if you have any deposit bottles to give to them.
Too many stores refuse to take bottle types that they don't sell though. I am often left with one or two bottles that technically should be eligible, but I have to take them back with me. The Norwegian way seems more convenient for consumers.
I think from a certain size on, they have to take them back. I understand smaller stores not wanting/having to bother. But maybe I'm wrong, after all I almost exclusively buy from REWE, so it's never something I encounter personally.
I encounter this mostly when buying craft beer from a specialized store. These import bottles have Pfand too, but you can't return them to any machine. Have to remember which ones go back to the craft beer shop. Which is kinda obvious though, so I'm not complaining.
Isn’t there a decline in deposit bottle usage in Germany?
When I was a kid beer was delivered to your house by the crate and empties picked up. I was led to believe this has become less common, which would be regrettable bc it was elegantly efficient.
Every other month I see old products going from "disposable" to "with deposit". So I don't think so. The latest for me were the tiny juice bottles from Rewe. 25c Pfand.
Edit: it's reusable/refillable bottles that I am remembering and referring to, and I'm happy to say the system in Germany seems to be strong, per Google.
wow, what a badly designed site. I can't even look at it because it keeps pestering me with some popup that asks for my ZIP code (which I don't want to provide, as I just want to know what that page is all about)
Deliveries, I don't know. But every sparkling water, beer bottle has deposit as have all (?) cans. So a decline would be kinda impossible unless people stop buying those.
I live in the US, and all grocery stores I have been to have those reverse vending machines.
I also never bother to return my bottles and cans, because it's still a waste of my time. I put all bottles and cans in the recycling, along with anything else recyclable (on the backend, almost everything goes to a landfill anyway. But that's not my problem.)
Edit: for those asking, I have lived in multiple New England states, and bottle return machines have been common in all of them.
I'm guessing the New England states were Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and/or Connecticut? (not new hampshire or rhode island, which don't have deposit laws).
My guess it that these machines are only going to be in states with deposit laws, and it's likely the grocery stores are legally required to take returns (whether by machine or human).
There are 10 states with bottle deposit laws (which mostly predate consumer recycling): California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.
I suspect a much higher percentage of material actually gets recycled from bottles returned via deposit law mechanisms, compared to US standard "single stream" residential recycling, which are kind of notorious for their low rate of actual recycling (material taken away from homes actually being recycled) due to contamination and expense of separation.
In many places while they may be required, their position is relegated to the back or hidden side of the building. I imagine this is because most shoppers do not return their bottles and cans… while some consider those who endeavor to do so “unsightly” or a “traffic hazard.”
At the large Finnish LAN party / demoscene event Assembly, there are people who go around all the desks collecting the cans and bottles people leave on them. I wonder how much they make doing this, considering there are thousands of desks with everyone consuming energy drinks and soda nonstop.
I once paid for most of my trip to a hacker event in Germany by picking up and returning all the discarded bottles of beer and Club Mate. It took maybe two hours.
The cost of food is suppressed, because our elites, leaders and politicians know what happens when that too is subjected to inflation as well, and that is revolution. Meanwhile, as far as I can see, the frog-boiling of regular people has been steady at least since the 60's. Back then the cost of a nice apartment was about one or two years pay. Today it's easily 10 years pay, and so the former middle class opt out of having children because all value property is too high for them to afford. Meanwhile the only promise our elites are willing to give us, is that we'll own nothing and be happy. Well, we'll see about that. Because what's happening now is that they are now unable to keep inflation from also seeping into everyday products. Gas and power is already buckling here in Europe, and I suspect food prices will be next. Unless they can control it, then social unrest is sure to follow.
Don't forget the wonderful American invention of the "gig economy".
Minimum wage, healthcare, job security? No we must destroy everything our ancestors fought for.
Here in california the fee per bottle and can goes to state as taxes. You can get it back by turning in bottles and cans at a recycling center but the California state had made it impossible to return these cans for money. They have systematically shut down automated recycling redemption machines, caused long lines at in person centers and so on.
> They have systematically shut down automated recycling redemption machines
I remember these machines outside of every grocery store, and now I don't see them anywhere anymore. It never occurred to me it was a purposeful effort, but then again I never gave it much thought.
> Because people hate for the homeless and want to punish them, for some reason
It's more, I think, that people hate seeing the homeless, and want to keep them away. They don't particularly care enough to hate them, they just don't want to have to encounter them.
I think Oregon has the right idea. We did invent the bottle bill, so I guess that isn't a complete surprise. The redemption value is tied not to inflation, but to redemption rate. If it drops low enough, the deposit is increased. We started at 5 cents, and in 2015 the redemption rate had slipped down to 65%, so the deposit was doubled to 10 cents.
Ok so we raise money to rent giant warehouses, hit the streets and buy up all the bottles for 10 cents, and then just warehouse them. Redemption rate slips, deposit increases -> profit.
Are you kidding? You'd have to be insane to agree with that. Some people are already independently wealthy. Some people -- a really large number of people -- are supported by other people.
If the value of having the cans collected is less than the cost of having someone collect them, then it turns out the cans don't need to be collected after all.
In Germany, at least last time i was there, a plastic bottle got you a full Euro back as a deposit. Aluminum a little less but still good. The result was you basically never saw a plastic bottle on the ground outside of tourist areas where people didn't know about the Pfand. And even there, the bottle doesn't stay on the ground for long because that's a whole euro there on the ground. Nobody throws away a whole euro, and just about every one will bend down to pick one up.
> This is why I have always thought that can and bottle deposit prices should keep up with inflation: to give the collectors a living wage
It's not just inflation you have to keep up with but also falling material costs as aluminum is more mass produced, etc.
Where does the money come from for the refunds? Without government subsidies I don't think it would make economic sense for a recycling center to pay $.50 or even $.25 per can if the amount of aluminum scrap is only worth $.10
Typically these function as deposit programs: e.g. $0.10 per can is levied at retail purchase, to be hypothetically returned when the can is turned in for recycling, effectively creating bounties for the pickup and recycle of cans discarded rather than recycled.
Ah, so GP is essentially proposing raising prices on canned and bottled goods then to allow collectors to have living wage. That is a tricky needle to thread though because raise refund prices too much and fewer people will litter because it's like throwing money on the ground.
Precisely what we need is to make the deposit prices so high that the homeless will fight over them. Then we can record them and upload the videos to liveleak.
Where I live we have curbside recycling and people are paid a living wage to come by in a truck and pick it up. However, the folks 'collecting" these cans are actually taking them out of the bins during the night / morning before pickup.
The cost of drinks largely hasn't increased in line with inflation, so you'd very quickly arrive at an unsustainable situation where returning a can/bottle would give you more money than it cost you to buy it.
It can never give you more than it cost — the redemption value gets added to the cost of the beverage. So a $1 bottle of Coke would cost $1.05 if the redemption value were 5¢ And it would cost $1.50 if the redemption value were 50¢.
The reason the redemption value has not gone up much is that people would balk at paying so much for the goods upfront, IMO. Adding 20¢ per can would add nearly $5 to the cost of a 24-pack or soda. The cost per ounce of soda drops dramatically when you buy in volume, so the redemption value would grow to be a substantial portion of the total cost for larger purchases.
You're right that they won't give up drinking soda! But the experience of Philadelphia, [1] which imposed a per-ounce soda tax (later repealed) shows us that these tend to drive consumers to other jurisdictions (NJ) to buy groceries. This means Philadelphia lost out not only on soda sales, but also on other groceries purchased at the same time.
Another issue that arises is that people will actually transport recyclables across state lines to arbitrage the differences in redemption value. [2] This only happens if there are large enough disparities, but in the US this is almost certain to happen due to the different policy choices made by nearby states.
The thing I don't get about US though......people keep pointing out that US States are as big if not bigger than most European countries - and over there companies somehow manage to create completely unique packaging for every country, distribute their product and keep stock of what's where. Why not in the US? If this sort of thing is enough of an issue, why not make sure that each state gets different barcode, or slightly different label or whatever, to make sure the bottles are not returnable between state lines?
Germany pays a lot more for cans and bottles than Poland does, but you can't return Polish bottles and cans in German stores because the barcodes and labels are different - you can cross the border without any issue, but there is no way to exploit the economic imbalance in recyclables returns.
While I see your point about how to solve this problem, why is this even a problem "worth" solving? Going back to the nuts and bolts: are the bottles and cans any different between countries? What is exactly protected from accepting "foreign" recyclable materials? In a free market, if people start dropping over the border to recycle, local price would quickly match up to avoid people having to make the trip (somebody would make a business out of it, and then original deposit price would soon match up with where it's more expensive).
It rather seems to be the other way around: it's easier to devise a system where you go by something unique and country-specific like a bar-code (to avoid counterfeiting business), so that's why it's like that (of course, there's also living standard difference between countries).
Still, even if there was an incentive discrepancy, it's easy for all the countries to match upward since this is basically just "loaning" bottles/cans out, and you only need to pay out "once" for your regular supply of whatever drinks you like to get, and after that, you are just re-starting the "loan".
FWIW, it's been like that in Serbia since forever, but only for the same product where the producer cared (you'd get an entire beer case, and then once you are through it, you bring it back to the store, and pick up another one): this allowed them to keep the price down and get more turnaround for their drinks.
I sure prefer the legal framework that allows returning it regardless of the specifics (producer or such).
This did actually happen with bottled water- New York State started charging 5-cent deposits on plastic disposable bottled water, and so now some bottled-water companies sell bottles in non-deposit states with different labeling and barcodes. That seems like an exception though, since it's not often the case with other deposit beverages.
The weird one to me is that- due to various archaic laws- in New York state carbonated hard cider in cans or bottles is not considered the same as other carbonated alcoholic beverages in cans, and is exempt from all the deposits. I'm a bit surprised they haven't changed that one.
No one drove to NJ for groceries, the $5 bridge toll would offset any gains. You’d drive to one of the surrounding counties in PA, provided you lived close enough for the trip to make sense. According to that paper, that happened in about 50% of sales, which is still a net win in terms of reduced consumption.
Very little is “lost” to the city when that happens, because groceries are tax exempt.
Not sure what you think happened with property taxes, but there was no rash of store closings. Due to consumers periodically bulk buying soda at a different chain outlet or otherwise.
when it's a 100% rebate for the vast majority of people i think it does? the money doesn't go to the state, it goes to the organisation that handles the recycling, and you get a 100% rebate for doing the normal thing
In California the money goes from bottlers to a state agency and the program is essentially used to fund curbside recycling programs. The costs get passed down to consumers. While it’s indirect, it’s essentially a government service you’re taxed for that you pay either with your wallet or your labor.
Additionally, since the deposit is not exempted from sales tax, the consumer also pays more sales tax than they would otherwise.
for the rest, the only alternative I see would be for the government to get ouf of it completely and say it's up to each seller/distributor to handle their own bottles, but I guess this would require more complicated logistics?
I'm pretty sure that's what happens for glass bottles in Germany, I remember bringing back plastic crates of bottles to the brewery, and buying beer in big sturdy 50cl bottles that had obviously been refilled dozens of times already
In Finland the deposit is 0.15€ per can. You quickly learn to calculate that out when coming with cost per litre... So it only takes some getting used to.
The math a bit tougher than that. The volume of soda bottles is different now than in 1980. And most bottles aren’t glass, but plastic. Even the glass ones use different glass and cans use different amounts of aluminum. I agree that deposit values haven’t kept pace, but there are more variables at play.
I doubt the volume of the soda bottle affects the cost to the manufacturer much. Soda prices are rarely linear to their size. At my local supermarket a 2-liter bottle from the aisle is typically cheaper than a 20oz from the fridge by the register.
For plastic, you’re right. I think they use the same blanks for multiple sizes of bottles. For glass bottles, I’m not so sure. I don’t remember many plastic bottles in the 1980s. They were coming, but I still have glass in my head for all but 2L bottles at the time (but I was really young). But the point is the majority of bottles you’d see for recycling would have been glass (or cans) at that time. And the amount of materials used for packaging was different back then.
For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid.
Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change the economics.
This is how it works in Germany. You pay a deposit on every bottle. To get your money back requires a machine to recognise each bottle/can as legitimate, based on the bar code.
Now, yes, people could print stickers with fake bar codes on… but I don’t think that would work well at the scale of the major fraud operation you’re envisaging…
I live in Finland, it has this system, the UK where I’m from does not, you just squash your cans and bottles into a weekly recycling collection.
It’s the ‘squash’ bit that I miss and makes me hate the deposit system. You have to keep the cans all fully intact, so the machine can read the barcode, so you have to give up stacks of room in your house and carry an awkward big bag of mostly air around to return them.
Do you know if they need the cans in their original shape in order to recycle them? If it's just to keep the barcode intact, presumably it could be printed on the can's base instead.
That’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a while.
You sort of have to lay the can sideways on a belt and it spins it around before scanning the barcode, then it carries it to the appropriate bin internally (where it gets crushed). In my opinion it’s a waste of time, the machines are sticky and smelly and I feel sorry for the staff who have to go and un-jam them regularly, but on the upside you won’t see any littering around the place (well, in summer you will - it’s socially acceptable just to toss them on the ground but someone will be along to pick it up within minutes)
After the can gets accepted by the machine it gets crushed and sold in bulk to a 3rd party. That 3rd party is buying and selling by weigh and is usually the one who's usually getting the government check. So all barcodes do is reduce casual fraud. The pros are already injecting it higher up the supply chain.
Do they use a different bar code on bottles sold in Germany to those sold by the same producer in bordering countries? That's something American producers generally don't do for different states (yet?) - they use the same label and write the relevant deposit amount for every state on the bottle.
There’s a beer I like that’s cheaper and easier to order direct from the Danish brewery than buy from the alcohol monopoly in Finland. The cans look identical. Of course I tried putting them in the return machine, but it would not credit them (although they’ll still take them in for recycling)
People also buy huge quantities of beer personally from Estonia (2 hr boat ride, nice day trip) and the system would probably collapse in a day if they paid for cans from anywhere.
I crush any that I know won’t give money before putting them with the household metal recycling collection as I don’t want some poor soul wasting their time fishing them out and returning them.
In Sweden, and probably most of Europe as far as I would guess, the European/International Article Number [1] barcode system is used. It encodes the country first, so yes.
You cannot get cash from foreign cans or PET bottles, since the deposit was not paid here.
The EAN definitely doesn't indicate the country where the product was sold. In your Swedish supermarket, I expect you'll find plenty of products with Danish or German EANs (certainly that's the case in Ireland).
As your linked article says, "The first three digits of the EAN-13 (GS1 Prefix) usually identify the GS1 Member Organization which the manufacturer has joined (not necessarily where the product is actually made)"
Yes, they are different between Germany and Austria, which otherwise share labeling for everything - the water and juice bottles I bought while skiing in Austria were rejected for return when I got home to Germany, despite being from brands also widely sold here.
Isn't arbitrage like that just how markets are supposed to work? Still ends up with the cans redeemed and disposed, just goes about it in such a way that the maximum amount of value is extracted from them.
No. This is almost the opposite of a market-based system. Aluminium cans are artificially made available only at tens or hundreds of times their cost to produce.
> Aluminium cans are artificially made available only at tens or hundreds of times their cost to produce.
You forgot externalized costs... add the cost of cleaning up after irresponsible people leaving behind their cans wherever they want or the added costs and pollution of making a can from fresh aluminium ore (bauxite), and suddenly that "ten or hundred times" becomes "at cost".
Deposits are a regulatory way to account for externalized costs, at least to a bit.
The deposit has nothing to do with the dirtiness of mining. It's so that people like you don't see a can blowing in the wind.
If it were about the mining the deposit would be on everything else made of aluminum too.
Of all the things to let into the environment aluminum is one of the least worst. As with everything else, it's yet another story about how narratives, marketing, knee jerk reactions and bike shedding are the name of the game when it comes to public policy.
I disagree. If the amount is low enough that it only incentivises people that are desperate, you are at arms length hiring people at poverty wages. I agree that we seem to have such low expectations of our society, that wanting something better than that seems fanciful and foolish.
Wages become a market question. The more their worth the more people start looking for a limited supply. Suppose you could pick up a can every 6 seconds (including time to collect deposit) that’s 600 cans per hour at even 5c per can people would make 30$/hour which is solid pay. Except at that value people would go out if they could pickup a can every 12 seconds and make 15$/hour, down to whatever wages still motivate homeless people.
At a higher value say 25c/can picking up 1 can per minute is 15$/hour so again people would go out even if they weren’t collecting very many cans. Higher deposits should result in people doing a better job even if their not paid more.
That's basically the same reason why Uber can't give their drivers a raise, even if they wanted to. Unless they were barring new would-be drivers from joining.
Of course, that also means that they can't cut drivers' pay easily either. Especially with competition from eg Lyft.
I've tried it a few of times just out of curiosity, and it's a frustrating exercise in paying attention to detail and being rejected over and over.
Only about half the otherwise identical cans and bottles you see are returnable for deposit due to legalese reasons, like the wrong store or the wrong state.
For example, a huge portion of Poland Spring bottles have a red strip on the label, and these are not returnable because they were bought in a 24-pack.
I used to go through a lot of crystal geyser bottles, and I would try to get the CRV back at my local recycling center. But they seemed dead set on scamming people. The first few times I went they would give me very little money for what seemed like a lot of bottles. When I finally asked them about it they said they pay by weight unless you count it out. This results in dramatic underpayment.
The next time I went, I had the bottles all counted, and I told the guy right as I was giving him the bag. He weighed it, threw it into a common bin, and pretended not to have heard the count. The next time he said something about having to count it out with me, or something. It was a frustrating experience, and it seemed lousy to be scammed when I was going doing all the things I was supposed to do to recycle.
Then I got a sodastream, and my bottle usage plummeted.
Not to be contrarian, but it seems like the shame around poverty is just as strong as it ever was. Or else why are all these stories and anecdotes on the form "My parents collected cans but I made a career and I don't collect cans" or "I used to collect cans but then I got some kind of break through my hard work and now I don't collect cans anymore". It's a lot like depression: "I used to be depressed but then I worked out/bootstrapped myself/whatever and now I'm not depressed anymore."
So. Are there any people on HN currently collecting cans?
> it seems like the shame around poverty is just as strong as it ever was
I had the same thought as I was reading. It was all "our struggles make us stronger", not "being poor isn't something to be ashamed about". I had the opposite reaction of most people here, I found it sad that she has to act like the fact that she grew up poor was some personal deficiency she needed to overcome, rather than a tragedy that largely happens randomly due to the circumstances of your birth.
People shouldn't have "to be supportive". It's like telling someone you have diabetes and being relieved when they don't make fun of you. No, not making fun of you should be the default.
That interpretation isn't justified. The author makes it clear that she is still financially dependent on her parents, who still collect cans for a living.
About a decade ago in Toronto, Ontario, Canada we actually made collecting cans out of recycling bins illegal. The city claimed that these "scavengers" were taking their rightful profits.
Well if city doesn't get that revenue then the will raise the price of garbage collection. Doesn't seem that surprising.
From the article:
But city officials argue the small-time scavengers aren’t its chief concern.
“We’re not going after the single person going down the street going through the Blue Box,” Orpin insists. “We’re going after the professional recyclers, the guy who is running a truck or multiple trucks.”
The dirty secret of recycling is that a significant percentage of what the city of Toronto collects is not really recyclable; those black take out containers, pizza boxes, plastic bags, contaminated paper products, loose lids ....
The only truly recyclable products are aluminum cans, clean paper and clear glass. Aluminum cans and clean cardboard are the only thing that really pays to recycle. If for profit companies, or even thousands of individuals, are going around scooping all the aluminum and clean cardboard first, the system quickly collapses as it becomes a huge expense and blue bins become simply another garbage bin.
These scavengers were also exacerbating contamination in process -- our blue bins would regularly get dumped out on the street or sidewalk and the blue recycling bags ripped open so the "sorter" could find the cans faster.
To be clear, there are no "profits" in recycling ... it's a loss with some cost recovery.
I know that the city tells you not to put those things in the blue bin, but it's full of that junk. Then a bunch of stuff they say they recycle isn't really recycled, or gets tossed because it's contaminated.
It's strictly because you can't get the color back out of the glass. They want to make new, clear bottles, instead of just accepting that we could all live with just brown bottles.
They are stealing. They’re trespassing on people’s property to take resources that don’t belong to them and selling them at a profit, depriving the city’s recycling program of revenue. And the people I see doing this are probably not homeless people since they are picking up all the metal in a fancy pickup truck. Not only are they collecting cans but also old metal furniture and appliances. This is a business they run at the city’s expense, doing redundant with the city already paid for.
There is a ton of case law in pretty much every common law jurisdiction establishing that stuff that is visibly trash-like and abandoned in a public area is fair game.
If the job is redundant because volunteers are doing it than maybe the city should stop paying for it.
These areas are private property: the ends of people’s driveways. The city pays for trash and recycling collection from these areas. The scavengers steal all of the profitable items (mostly metal) from people’s recycling, making the recycling program even more unprofitable than it already is.
They're driving fancy pickup trucks so I wouldn't call them desperate. They are scavengers by choice. They could just as easily pick up a trade and do honest work for a living.
There is absolutely no shortage of work for skilled trades workers. My roommate is a drywall taper and he makes a lot of money. He tells me about how unreliable the other people in his trade are. There is a TON of opportunity for people who work hard and act responsibly.
I remember walking the roadside with my grandparents when I was about five years old, collecting cans. It wasn’t exactly a “money for survival” type thing, but it was definitely welcome income. I had my own bag, and the cans I collected gave me enough money to buy toys and stuff.
In my neighborhood some people will bag cans and bottles separately from the other recycling and leave them out for the collectors. Another is to loosely and visibly tie the recycling bag so it’s easier to open.
If you have collectors in your neighborhood I recommend these easy ways to help.
I started doing this a few months ago, too. I noticed that the collectors would be digging through the recycling bins, and I was worried that they'll cut themselves or something, so I decided to make their life a bit easier, and I separate my glass beverage bottles and cans from the regular recycling bin. I've been trying to get my neighbors to do this to. I live in a shared condo building, so this has the nice advantage for us of making less recycling for the regular pickup, and easier to carry the big toter bin.
The boxes of cans and bottles seem to disappear within an hour of me putting them out the night before.
I like these types of stories that show the harsh economic realities of many in America. It was not the case many years ago, when they could become an American citizen by working hard enough. Now they are servants, beholden to the corrupted members of our government.
>Now they are servants, beholden to the corrupted members of our government.
ITYM corporations. The government is desperately trying to help and corporate interests (in the form of Joe Manchin's blocking of the BBB act) are how we got to this point.
Most people have forgotten that we "solved" the ozone hole problem through regulation. We could have done the same for green house emmissions. But businesses did not want cut into their profits and now here we are.
Nope, the worst thing a corporation can do is try to sell me something I don’t want. The worst the federal govt can do to me is imprison me, or worse, kill me. It’s time we hold these fascists accountable.
Ever thought that these people are straight out of the holy books - have little themselves, struggle, and in the same time save the rest of the world by recycling what others would not…? We praise monks in monasteries, but forget to hail those who do the dirt.
During the great recession I had a co worker, a legendary game designer in some circles, tell me he was collecting cans to pay for gas.
When he was unemployed he was desperate for any type of work. I was more interested in how gentrification makes her family's life harder. Back when I was 19 you could get a place in LA for 600$. Now same place is 1300$, no matter how many shifts or cans you pick up your not covering that.
I hope some help comes to working class America...
American households are intended/designed to purchase property. If you don't, you're perpetually at the whims of the housing market. You may agree or disagree with this as a way to structure society, but renting long-term is always going to be a losing proposition outside of some very specific situations. The biggest source of middle class wealth is real estate for a myriad of reasons.
hearing $1300 and $600 in terms of rental money and living in NYC I cant help but ask what neighborhoods is that rent available? Back in the late 90's friends who were moving out at 17-18 Yo were having a hard time finding local places for $500 in the boonies of Queens.
I own some property and have a large 2nd floor 3BR that can fetch $2500 and its in a shitty neighborhood where someone was shot around the corner the other day. Most 2BR apartments are 1800 and up with 1BR apartments starting at 1300+. People living in Manhattan shoe boxes are paying ~2000+ for 1BR.
LA is a big city just like NYC. You can get apartments for under $1000 but they're usually illegal basement conversions in a crime ridden dump or a modest 1BR split into two shoe box studios in or near said crime ridden dumps.
If you want to see what happens when you ignore basic economics and focus on feel good solutions, come on down.
Instead of making it easier to build housing，the local government effectively floods the market with housing vouchers. If you give out a 1200$ housing vouchers, a unit which would only be 800$ on the free market is all of a sudden 1200$ since that's the voucher's max.
I really do miss the LA of my youth, but it's gone now.
I'm guessing that the cans in this story are paid for by weight rather than the 10-20 cent deposit/refund you get where I am?
How much is that worth? With the deposit, collecting cans can be a fairly lucrative side line for children and the retired - you often see people collecting cans from bus stop trashbins and at music festivals or park events there will often be people going around with large trash offering to dispose of empty beer cans.
This story is set in Brooklyn, so the author's parents are likely benefiting from the five cent deposit on every beverage can sold in the state of New York [0].
Can deposits are a great idea, in my opinion. Why don't more places have them? They give people an incentive to recycle (so they get their deposit back), and if they choose to litter, whoever cleans up after them gets the money.
Because it obfuscates costs and creates complexity that can cause more issues, such as people raiding garbage bins.
It would be more straightforward if government paid for cleanup of litter and it becomes a part of the spending budget where the amount of spend can be tracked.
And teach children not to litter and cultivate that sense of responsibility for one’s environment.
In the end, the deposit is a simpler and low-cost low-effort solution. It's probably the best example of a policy where a small change to law can impact behavior greatly.
If you go to a city with a plastic bag tax, you'll notice that far fewer people are using plastic bags. Cashiers won't automatically drop a single item into a bag, they'll ask if you need them and even when they do, they'll use fewer bags.
The funny thing is, a policy like a 7 cent bag tax is incredibly negligible. That means your big-ass shopping trip with 20 plastic bags is costing you $1.40 if you choose to go that route. You could absolutely choose to do that every time you shop for groceries and it wouldn't affect your finances. But that's the thing, people see a financial incentive, and no matter how small, they take it. Similarly, that's why the can/bottle deposit is so effective.
I read this article recently about giving people a tiny monetary incentive to go to the gym got people to go back:
Surely, these gym members spent more money on gas to just get themselves to the gym in the first place!
Prosecution of littering is impractical, "it doesn't scale," as one might say. It's nearly impossible to catch that crime as it occurs.
I'm not even sure that "raiding garbage bins" is an issue. I guess sometimes people digging through garbage make a mess, but every time I see this happen in real life the people doing it are relatively respectful and make sure the trash stays in the bin.
Local governments already do pay for the cleanup of litter, but the problem is that litter is just everywhere. It's a losing numbers game. You'd have to hire a literal army to keep it in check.
By the way, can/bottle deposits don't cost the taxpayer money! It's a tax you pay on the drinks when you buy them, and you get it back when you return them. That's why it's called a deposit.
There was an app called GymPact that charged you (an amount you determined) if you didn’t go to the gym as you agreed - I think it went as rewards to the people who did show
At 10-20 cents deposit it's not really "lucrative" enough to be a good income for anyone, I think you're lucky if you can make more than minimum wage doing it.
We have a similar deposit where I live (Vancouver), and a few times I've collected all my cans and dropped them off at the deposit center. The centers are in inconvenient areas, and I've dropped off maybe 400 cans, which is a pretty full car load, but takes almost 2 hours with driving and sorting. So about $20/hr not counting expenses like gas, wear and tear, and the car itself (many people doing this do so without a vehicle though).
And these were cans I had collected myself at a place I was living. If you consider going from house to house and checking dumpsters for the cans, it takes a lot more time. If you have a truck and 2 people and manage to grab all the cans on collection day, you might make a bit more than minimum wage, but outside of collection day I think you'd be better off with a minimum wage job.
I suspect a lot of people doing this have other obstacles preventing them from holding a job though, which is why something they can do on their own time is worthwhile to them.
For some more context, I think McDonalds starts at $18/hr here and even that isn't really enough to afford living comfortably in Vancouver. Also, most deposits are 10 cents, but I think some larger glass containers are up to 20 cents.
With the caveat that I am pulling this from very old memory, the deposit on cans is still more like 5 cents. If you collected them in bulk then you were paid by weight, which was discounted on the presumption of non-aluminum mass (fluid, dirt, etc), and some people would try to sandbag their cans. It wasn't a lot of money by any means but it wasn't nothing either.
There was a lot more can litter back then, so it was easier to collect. A side effect of aluminum recycling is that most of that litter was cleaned up by can collectors.
The deposit is generally worth more than the scrap price for the cans. For example, NY can deposit is $0.05 [0] while the average scrap price is $0.13/lbs [1]
Several years ago I worked in a small office with a coke machine, and we would put the empty cans into a bin next to it that the cleaners would (presumably) take away from time to time.
At some point we noticed that the office was becoming infested with fruit flies, and after some investigation we discovered months or years worth of those cans in a closed off hallway, in a dozen giant trash bags.
My manager tossed a couple of the bags into the back of his car and drove to a nearby grocery store where there was a can recyling "machine" outside, that you could feed the cans into and get a receipt to cash in in the store. One. Can. At. A. Time. He spotted some kids skateboarding nearby and said "hey do you want to make some money" and gave them the cans, then made a couple more trips to get the rest of them.
Probably he could have gone inside and spoken to a manager to arrange a more efficient way to offload the cans, but those kids were absolutely stoked.
I used to collect cans and bottles. Nowadays I don't know where you'd even take them to redeem them; there isn't enough money in it to justify paying sonebody to sort them; an entire truckload of cans wouldn't pay for the gasoline to drive them to the store.
Same. We used to collect cans, and whenever we filled up several trash bags worth, we'd drive to a can return machine in a parking lot. We'd press a button on the machine, and it would come to life. We'd then dump cans in a funnel, and coins would come out of a coin return. Now that I think about it, even when I was a kid, I don't recall ever seeing another machine like it.
Isn't the idea that one takes the bottles when you go to the store anyway? At least that's what we do. We've cut down on bottle use also, but even so there's a load from time to time, and I've started buying joghurt that comes in reusable glass jars so whenever I get new ones I return the old ones.
Maybe that works if you have the infrastructure set up for that workflow.
The way that it worked for us, was we saved up a year's worth of bottles and cans in the basement in 55 gallon barrels, then we took them to the local redemption place attached to the general store, where one of the high school kids that attended the full-service pumps would go sort them, which took an hour or so. If it was a good year, it paid for a few rides and some french fries at the county fair.
I don't understand. What infrastructure do you need to setup for that workflow? Instead of having someone spend an hour on a year's worth of bottles, you could hand them five bottles that you used since the previous store visit and get your dollar in thirty seconds.
> Now, when people ask me what my parents do for a living, I tell them not with embarrassment or shame, but with pride.
In this context, is "pride" appropriate, or would "dignity" (or something else) be better?
My mother tongue is italian. I understand "pride" as referring to something exceptional that was done (which doesn't seem to be the case in this article), "dignity" on the other hand as something <appropriate? something not to be ashamed of?>?
At least in the US I think pride is now used most commonly in the sense of dignity and in the context of the article pride is the more formulaic term (all based on my general sense from random stuff I read). As in "Pride Month" or "proud to be ...". The sense you mention does also exist and would usually be the case if refering to a particular person or event and in particular when saying "proud of". Although regularly working 12 hours a day is not common so that sense could potentially be intended in this case as well. Even that sense wouldn't necessarily be that strong and conveying that you feel a strong emotion of pride in some accomplishment would involve additional words. Interestingly, when I checked the definition on Wictionary quickly it gave primarily negative connotations to the word while I think that sense is rarely used in the US and usually in a religious context (and even there it would often involve additional words to indicate that the negative sense is used), although I think it may have been used that way more commonly in the past. Usually other words would be used in the negative sense.
My dad walked/s most mornings. During my childhood he always brought a little store plastic bag and picked up and cans or bottles he walked by on the road. After many many years he said for something significant with the money like a semester of tuition or a car down payment. Something like that.
Everyone does what they have to do to survive. I've delivered newspapers, delivered pizza, worked retail, stocked in a warehouse, etc. I find recyclable collecting more respectful than much higher paying jobs that take advantage and prey on the suffering of others for your benefit.
It is tricky being in a community which is predominantly more moneyed than your family and burns a brand into poorer people that never goes away. Greasers and socs stay greasers and socs into their 90s, and then they die.
Something that the article reminded me of: Is gagging a cultural phenomenon? I've only seen gagging mentioned in the US. I've never heard anyone in my country mention gagging, and we don't have a word for it. If there's a very strong putrid smell, we don't make gagging sounds, we just hold our breaths. I wasn't even aware that someone can puke from a strong smell until I saw it on TV, and it seems psychosomatic to me.
All my money as a kid (and that's over 30 years back in Communist-then Bulgaria) was coming from recycling paper and bottles (we didn't have cans). It was more work than it is now as you had to wash the bottles very well. Back then, it was the norm for kids to do it and especially so with paper. I can imagine today's kids doing so much work for little money. But I've though my kids and we don't throw a single recyclable into the trash! It's inconvenient to recycle as you need to have room, and we have to separate paper, plastic, glass, etc. from other trash, but we do it. I recently switched to Recycle From Home [0], which is now in Orange County, California.
This is honestly sad, pathetic, and nothing to be proud of. There's no chance at moving up doing this line of work and depends entirely on the state continuing a recycling program that pays less and less as inflation rises. You put yourself at risk by competing with homeless for these cans. Any time you're not working you lose out on profit and that can happen just from getting sick or injured.
There's so many better jobs out there. My own immigrant parents started from doing service jobs in the food industry, driving, and kitchen work. They ended up doing all sorts of other jobs over the years but now own four properties with two fully paid off. This article isn't a success story, it's a story of failure.
Interestingly, ALL the comments here are about how bad it is, because, apparently, "NO MONEY = NO HAPPINESS".
Yet I've been blessed to live in several countries, and can speak from experience that most poor families I've seen are on average more happy than most rich families, in both US and Eastern Europe. They only think that they are unhappy, because of the constant struggle with money, but I've seen many lives of people to think otherwise.
So I'm not that pitiful towards the author. Their parents didn't have mental health issues, no one got killed or injured, so I'd say they lived mostly happy life, comparing to others.
I am curious: if you collect cans for a living, do you qualify for government assistance? Is it possible that Jessica Yauri receives aid earmarked for children so they can get proper nutrition, via her parents? She does not mention if she qualifies for lunch assistance. Also, I am assuming that she goes to a public school where she doesn't have to pay to attend. It is also not clear if she receives further aid in support of her going to college.
There is a mention of $400 towards high school fees causing some anxiety among her parents, but beyond that, not too many concrete details.
The focus of the article is on the writer's experience with the shame she experiences because of her parents' job, so perhaps it's not the right place for this information, but the composite picture would be a much more faithful representation of the overall experience of Jessica's.
This is also a point where America needs to introspect, as a nation: sure, we import less-fortunate immigrants, in large part because they are much more willing to do dirty jobs such as gathering cans, but it's also true that it all comes out in the wash: society as a whole is responsible for bearing the costs of keeping these people fed, clothed, schooled, and taken care of in medical emergencies. If you added up the costs, is the labor "cheap" anymore, or does it make more sense to discourage the immigration of what is likely to be a 2-3 generation underclass, and incentivise people already here to step in?
I am a little bit annoyed with the direction of your argument. To counter argue, it is obvious in this case that the value that you get from this “underclass” is more that the cheap labour, it’s also an educated young person with passion and depth of experiences that you would struggle to get from “people already here” alone. What has been coming out “in the wash” for the duration of your history, I assume you comment from US perspective, is a prosperous country, so it seems you have been getting a great deal.
In what specific way is an imported poor person better than a local poor person? There are plenty of generationally poor people in America already, so how does America benefit vs. by helping the poor that are already here to a higher extent. After all, citizenship or permanent residency means that you have a higher claim on your fellow-citizens' taxes that are set aside for the purpose of human development.
Second, the "educated young person" was educated courtesy of the United States, not her country of origin. I agree with you somewhat that immigrants have a higher drive to succeed. But, how do poorer uneducated, possibly illegal immigrants fare in this regard vs. self-supporting well-educated immigrants who are better able to integrate easily into the mainstream?
I believe immigration is essential to keep growth going, and to keep various social support systems such as Medicare and Social Security solvent in the current state. However, there is the subtle question of whether that is accomplished by having control and a say over what type of immigration it is that we want, or by relinquishing any semblance of control in the matter. Any democratic society with a right to self-determination should be able to have a frank discussion and the ability to decide for themselves how they proceed on this.
Economics does not work with specific comparisons for me, I.e. not in comparisons between this and that person. In your theoretical comparison, both are able to contribute given the proper opportunities, as a country you have the resources to give them both opportunities. The blocker as far as I can tell from an outsider’s perspective is that the society is conditioned against supporting each other.
I am myself a highly skilled immigrant (different country). It is convenient to be able to pick and choose, but this can end up in a kind of immigrant monoculture. I know of less skilled at the time of entry immigrants that have achieved more than me, by sheer passion and entrepreneurial spirit. Education is a good indicator but not the end all. Finally, this selection will work for first generation, what you get from the following generations is correlated perhaps, but not defined, and statistically as per my previous answer, the US got pretty good outcomes with minimal controls at the point of entry and with a pure aspirational system of values that self-selected success (big discussion now that we move on this and it’s relationship with generational poverty).
I don't think you are curious, rather you're making a not so subtly veiled point against immigration which is wholly inappropriate in the context of this thread.
Are the authors parents, or is the author even valid to reside in the USA permanently?
And before anyone cries "racist", my background is 100% similar to the author in question. It's a shame that in the USA we have people who never really learned the Spanish language or culture and go on with "latinx" which is mocked even on twitter, to people who protect people that may have entered the United States illegally.
Migrating for work or school are very valid routes, but as the author stated she was "12" when she started collecting cans with her parents, it paints a picture that she migrated to the United States sometime during middle school. With per parents not having a support network in place, being illiterate in English, it seems highly unlikely they migrated here for work or university. Same for the author being 12 as well, highly unlikely that she migrated to the United States and sponsored her parents.
Nothing veiled about it, very legitimate questions. Many other families come in the country legally and are able to sponser themselves, that is one of the main focal points of immigration services. Are the people who are changing their nationality, able to survive, prosper and adapt to a new environment? Alongside liability, why should the United States have to socially assist someone that is new or even potentially an illegal alien over a "real" USA Citizen?
It is 100% appropriate, and matches the context of the story of the author - or more specifically why can't the authors parents support their child?
Long-winded way of saying you think America should not allow poor people to immigrate because they might cost society too much, and poor Spanish speaking immigrants are probably illegal anyway.
It's valid. Refugees are refugees and are granted legal status. Illegitimate Spanish speaking aliens encourage human trafficking through unsafe conditions, Turbo, Colombia, Darien Gap, Cayotes in general and sponser cartels, - etc, worker extortion, unsafe work places (e.g. company hires illegal aliens, pays under minimum wage, no safety regards and if there's any talk out of line - it's just a call to ICE/DHS and the problem is solved and other problems are brushed under the rug, illiteracy, and future broken families because when they are caught, they will uproot or dampen their families in the USA financially and criminally.
Legal immigration is fine, there are support networks in place to grant a base wage/support, language support in Spanish and English Classes/Adult ESL classes/ Adult GED classes because they are a citizen and as an American USA Citizen they are entitled to that.
Your reply is baitclicky poverty porn that sounds bad, so it must be bad (and ignore every other issue because it feels bad) - because when you look at Indian Immigration, Chinese Immigration - it is 100% a different issue. Less of all the above issues.
The Statue of Liberty does not dictate complex public policy. America provides more (no strings-attached) aid to poor countries than any other country, and it also takes in more immigrants than perhaps the rest of the world combined (almost every country in the world has a net positive emigration rate to the USA).
I'm not sure you know what either "baitclick" or poverty porn are, and I'm very sure that you are misinformed about immigration in the United States, no matter how close to it you feel. Regardless, you don't get to dismiss facts simply because they make you feel bad.
There are not in fact significant support networks for legal immigrants, even refugees. There are informal community supports and nonprofits, but you have to live in the right place (and as a refugee, you don't get to choose).
More importantly, are you even aware that poor Spanish speaking people immigrate here legally without being refugees? They win greencards in the lottery every year or they get sponsored by family (that old bogeyman of chain migration!). (The author lives near her grandparents, perhaps that's how they arrived!)
Well, one of the problems is the pronounced tilt toward family migration, which occurs at the expense of highly skilled migrants. There are no political points to be won by encouraging legal, high-skilled immigrants, so they are treated like dirt while illegal immigrants' concerns (e.g., dreamers) rise to the top of the pile.
Another problem is jus solis, which enables illegal immigrants to lay claim to public funds indirectly via US-citizen children. The large number of illegal immigrants makes this a problem. If their numbers were better controlled by prompt enforcement of existing immigration law, then most people would simply not object to providing a high level of assistance to a small(er) number of illegal immigrants. However, the large number of illegal immigrants coupled with a low-medium level of assistance creates an underclass that will remain on the lower rungs for generations.
The last problem is the "refugee" problem. Because family and skilled migration are the only other legal paths available, many people abuse the refugee provisions by posing as victims of political violence, domestic violence etc., in order to gain entry. This has blown up into a huge crisis at the US-Mexico border.
A significant number of hispanic immigrants and citizens are in one of these problematic categories, and the sheer scale of the problem is the actual issue.
That is not true, by standard if you are a legal immigrant, you are entitled to social services and get the help you need. This can be seen most recently by the Afghanistan refugees resettling in the USA.
In any state, or province, you can look it up and see what services are available to legal immigrants.
The issue I stated above, and in other replies is that many Central and South Americans are here illegally, and that is why they fall into these types of traps and are continually stuck. There are more ways to access USA legally and green card is one of them. The most common one that I did not say was marriage and then the spouse that immigrated can sponsor their family.
While you write quite happy and positive, I urge you to not drink this sort of kool-aid.
While immigration to the USA is not perfect, there are services that help legal and in many cities/states they even ASSIST illegal aliens by allowing them to have identity cards, not enforcing laws, dropping cases, adding several languages to their social services, offering interpreter services, having guaranteed defense help for lawsuits (tenant rights) and the right to an attorney (public defender.)
I also suggest you review this, many immigrants and Americans don't.
A number of fair questions, I can only answer from personal experience.
My dad being a bus driver+conference phone tech and my mom an office admin we qualified for lunch and other aids as long as I was in school.
Many things were subsidized, but there were also things that weren't. It was hard to know when unless you always asked.
For smaller items sometimes it wasn't worth the embarrassment of always walking up to your teacher or school admin to ask if there was a discount for me. They knew who I was and what I was asking for. Super nice about it, but it doesn't make it feel any less worse. I also had to sneak away from friends. I also didn't want them around while I asked.
But you're right at a $400 required fee, usually there's a form of aid/discount.
I'll give the writer a benefit of doubt. Maybe there wasn't aid available? Maybe there was and it simply wasn't enough. $400 => $100 can still be very stressful.
Regardless, I thank my parents and grandparents, because being one of the lucky ones - I never went hungry.
It is always embarrassing, even for a young child, to be asking for what he feels to be handouts. But, in your personal experience, was there enough assistance, and did it make a meaningful difference at the right time in your life? Was being better-informed about assistance the biggest challenge by far?
Having read other stories of other children, yes I would say it was. As the pandemic really got going, shutting down schools was removing some kids only assured meals.
> and did it make a meaningful difference at the right time in your life?
mmmmm for me personally I want to say yes, but can't definitively say so because it wasn't profound enough for me to say "Ah yes my life changed" because of this. I can't tell what my life would have been like if my parents made more money during that same time period.
> Was being better-informed about assistance the biggest challenge by far?
As the parent, probably, I haven't asked. As the child, no, the hardest challenge was asking for it and being told by my parents to go ask. I'd bring home a paper that says you need $50 for this field trip, parents would send me to the office to ask. I'd fight/beg not to. Sometimes I actually got my way, most of time I didn't.
Today, I know/can-imagine what kind of stress that particular fight puts on parents and I thank them so much for raising me.
It gets into your bones. Even today with 25 years software dev experience under my belt, I still feel the twitch whenever I see a discarded bottle or can.