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Community Corner

Keep Your Hands Off Hermosa's Recycling, Trash

Stealing recyclables from your neighbors or the City is wrong, illegal, and not a victimless crime.

It's a sad comment on our society that we have a permanent homeless population of people who live on the streets, reduced to scrounging their way through trash bins and dumpsters each day to survive.

Many of them have serious disabilities of one kind or another, or addictions, or have simply fallen through the people-sized holes in the safety net we all hope catches any of us if we slip off the high wire we balance on.

Like the man says, "there but for the grace of God go I," and it is with no small measure of compassion that I approach the subject of whether it's right or wrong for homeless people to take the cans and bottles from a homeowner's or the city's recycle bins.

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As this Not So Great Depression lingers, more and more people are finding themselves in desperation mode. It's not just the homeless who are now willing to scavenge through their neighbor's recyclables to make a few bucks. 

Are they thieves?  Even if they are, should we look the other way?  What's the problem if they get the money for it instead of the city or the waste collection company?

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First off, yes, these people are thieves. As reported on Patch last month, California's "Theft of Recyclables" law makes it a crime to take materials including paper, glass, cardboard, plastic, or aluminum from any homeowner's bin or the city's recycling containers.

To me this isn't just a technicality. This kind of stealing is a crime and shouldn't be allowed. And, make no mistake about it, it's the community who's getting ripped off. 

It's the taxpayers who pay to have their trash picked up and their paper, cans, bottles and plastics properly recycled, reducing the overall cost of the service.

If you want to make recycling more of a humanitarian practice then you're free to collect the deposit for your cans and bottles and donate the money to homeless people or programs. 

Or you could make arrangements with any individual you'd like to help out and save your recyclables for them to turn in and get paid for. 

I have friends who do exactly that. Once a week they deliver a big bag full of cans and bottles to a homeless woman who lives on the street in Riviera Village.  I think that's admirable.  

But as a longterm South Bay homeowner I do have a problem with anyone rooting through the trash or recycling bins I put out on the street to be picked up by the service I pay for every month. 

First off, I've already been the victim of identity theft once and I don't want anyone going through the papers in my recycling. We're all supposed to be as paranoid as CIA spies when it comes to shredding documents we throw in the recycler, so it stands to reason my paper-recycling bin should be off limits to strangers.

Secondly, it wasn't that long ago when we didn't have citywide recycling programs, and lots of my fellow environmentalists worked long and hard to make it happen. When individuals divert the revenue from those programs into their own pockets, it's not good for the rest of us who pay the cost in terms of high fees and less effective programs for our city.

This kind of scavenging isn't exactly a clean or considerate operation either.  It's not unusual to find waste strewn about the surrounding areas, containers left open to emit stinky odors, and attract animals and pests.

In discussing this idea, I've heard people call recycling theft a "victimless crime" and suggest that the scavengers are doing us all a favor by sorting the trash and rescuing recyclables from going to the landfill.  But I don't know anyone in professional waste management, or any of us who are advocating zero waste goals, who believes these thieves are performing any kind of service. 

But most of all I think it's pathetic that anyone would feel that we're somehow helping the homeless by letting them pick through our garbage and throwaways. The homeless deserve legitimate solutions, direct help and resources, not the right to practice criminal behavior while we look the other way.

To learn more, check out what my friends in the very green city of Manhattan Beach say about recycling theft.

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