An article appearing in The Columbus Dispatch starts off with this sentence, “During the past several months, 22,741 New Yorkers contacted the city’s Department of Sanitation and arranged for pickup of refrigerators, air conditioners and freezers. In more than 11,000 instances, the machines vanished before sanitation workers arrived to pick them up.”
In the next paragraph, the article asks, “Who, then, is stealing the household appliances of New York?”
Theft?!? Of discarded appliances? Seems like a stretch to me.
Note: Unanswered is the length of time appliances sit on the curb before the city picks them up. This we do know: The time is longer than it takes scavengers to notice and remove. And the scavengers remove the items tax-free.
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well…as long as the citizens place their property on their property to be disposed of in a way they wish and contract for then the appliance should be left for that end. many may not care. but i expect there are numerous services in a large city (8 million or so?) that gladly come and get old appliances so the story is probably a fake…a lie, iow.
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The state will have to crack down on this, as it is harming no one, it is actually making the world a better place, and it makes the state appear even slower and inefficient than previously understood.
things like refrigerators are definitely worth something as trash. in my opinion it’s kinda dumb that nobody is making a business about scavenging the materials in waste. a typical refrigerator, for example, has about 10-20kg of steel, about half a kilo of copper in the compressor, probably another kilo or two of aluminium, i’m not absolutely certain but i think that all totalled would be worth about 30-50 dollars. it may not be economic for a business to gather this material, but poor people certainly would see the sense of it. i personally now pick up and am collecting every little piece of copper i see. copper was worth 2 dollars a kilo two years ago. it’s now worth 9 dollars. with the use of copper as a commodity money metal as is already happening in the first stages of the crack up boom that’s already going on. in my opinion copper is at 100 within 18 months. the theory i have is that due to time of production and the critical necessity of food, i should therefore be able to arbitrage the copper against foodstuffs and get more than i would have had i just bought it with my wages, with the price controls in force here.
As the old joke goes – “If you want to get rid of an old appliance, put it on your lawn with a for sale sign. Someone will steal it overnight.”
There was another similar article recently (maybe from Utah?) where the state was threatening to prosecute scavengers because there was a state law saying that once something was put out on the curb for pickup as waste that the state claimed ownership. It’s totally bizarre, but what would you expect from the state?
http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article230122.ece
“While trash is considered free to anyone who wants to take it, Anderson said anything that can be recycled is considered town property, so people who are taking the curbside items technically are breaking the law.”
So…if you put something out in the trash, and later realize it was a mistake and take it back, can you be prosecuted for theft? Truly bizarre!
Most residents of NYC are made up of immigrants. Much of which are from developing countries. In a city so densely populated, businesses of any type have a market. Discarded appliances are gold for people in developing countries.
I personally know a fella that fills his backyard with discarded appliances and parts. He picks them up off the curb or people give them to him for disposal. He then ships them to Haiti for sale. There is a market in such a place that the appliances are used in all types of ways.
The free market at its best. The government solution is to pile up all the trash somewhere and let it rot. Reminds me of how big a mess the Egyptian government made of their waste disposal system when they killed all the Coptic’s pigs and banned them from picking up trash.
The only thing that would make this more ridiculous is if the government charged for picking up these appliances. Do they?
There’s a sewage and waste tax on most water bills.
It seems natural that government would lay claim to ownership of garbage. Even fitting.
But the pickup would be worth probably $100-200 to the unionized municipal employees who “lost” the business of picking up the appliance and dropping it off at the scrapyard. Plus more money for the contractors who sell and maintain the municipal vehicles, and for the bureaucrats who administer the contracts and the workers’ salaries and benefits.
The gypsies who grab this junk off the street are the ultimate in low cost, lean living. If you watch carefully in your neighborhood on “garbage night” you’ll almost certainly see one or more of these people patrolling in their ancient, self-maintained pickup trucks. Evidently they’re poor folk who probably live in trailers or old farmhouses in the country with very low overhead except for gas. They must hold near-continuous yard sales at their places because they also pick up any kind of furniture that still looks usable.
I suspect that the gypsies (in the generic sense of the word, not ethnic) would also grab the aluminum cans out of the blue bins, but they’re probably so valuable to the municipal recycling programs that they would be tossed in jail the moment that they tried.
Having been to scrapyards, I can tell you from experience that cans are the province of addicts and folks who don’t know their way around the yard. It’s one of those things that’s not worth the effort to people who are serious about it.
That’s funny. A culture shock to compare urban life with more rural life. In Texas my father and I were putting a desk out for our private garbage collector to pick up (he didn’t charge extra just took it along with the rest of our garbage, or came back later for it). We had not even set the desk down and a pickup rolled up. The driver, a stranger to us, asked if they could have the desk. We replied “if you load it yourself.” It was a heavy desk….. and thus our ‘trash’ become someone else’s treasure.
In Denver I had some items I wanted to be rid of: a broken chest freezer, a kitchen sink, a huge tarp contractors had left at my house, etc. We were moving and didn’t care to take the time to freecycle, or Craigslist them. So I put the pile of them at the curb, behind a piece of wood with the word ‘free’ spray painted on it. By the next afternoon it was all gone, (including the piece of plywood!) At no cost to me. I had even clearly labeled the chest freezer as “broken.”
Only a bureaucrat would complain about how people’s garbage disappeared.
In one of the cities in my area, they have a ‘bulk garbage’ day once a month for the really big items. The night before and early morning, others drive along and pick thru it to find stuff they want. No one seems to have an issue with it so long as they aren’t being a nuisance (making a mess, say) or the like.
Recently our town raised the amount they charge for garbage collection. A private garbage disposal company, which our neighbor suggested to us, charged $15 less than the town. We canceled our garbage pick up with the town and contracted with the private company for their services. Even though we canceled our pick up with the town before the new week started and before the next garbage pick up day, the town prorated our bill and wanted to charge us for the day that elapsed before we called to cancel our services with them, which ended up being about $5. On principle alone I refused to pay them because they didn’t do anything for us to warrant a $5 charge. A couple of days ago I received two pieces of mail, one from the town and one from the private company.
The one from the town was a letter that stated: “Unless you send or bring the payment in full within 5 days of this letter, we will be forced to refer your account to an outside collection agency or to our attorney for further action…… Additional charges to include attorney’s fees may be added for any collection efforts.”
The mail from the private company was a sparkling, glitter-plated, card portraying a garbage truck driving through the snow. The card said: “One of the real joys of the Holiday Season is the opportunity to say thank you and to wish you the very best for the New Year!” It was hand signed by six different people.
It was striking how the message from the town was one of intimidation and threat, while the one from the business enterprise was one of well wishes and thanks. Given the choice, I’ll choose the market.
Buy 200 acres of undesirable, middle-of-nowhere land for $1,000,000. One half you turn into a landfill. The other half is a recycling center. Meeting regulatory requirements, performing a small portion of the dirt work, and erecting a few steel buildings for your administration, shop, and sorting center costs another $2m. (I’m greatly oversimplifying a three-year permitting and planning process)
You dig your 100 acre landfill with right angles, 18′ deep (we measure trash in yards, so 6 yards). Just the amount below grade is about 1800 acre-feet, or 2.9 million cubic yards. If you charge a dollar a yard (most pickup trucks can carry a yard of carefully-stacked trash bags) and throw it in the hole without compacting it, you’ve just about made your initial investment back, and you’re back to a nearly-flat bit of land.
Most rural landfills I visit charge $20-$25 per yard, and we’re talking ranches and trailers. In more urban and eco-conscious places, where people are interested in their trash, the price creeps up past $40, and it’s not unusual in California to go into the $70/yard range. Landfills generally keep below 500 acres (depending on age) and good engineering can take them vertically one or two hundred feet, top to botom. Compaction and waste diversion can take a yard at the gate and reduce it 80%.
Now go back to your recycling center. Don’t bother to charge people to drop off their bottles and cans, but charge a nominal fee for refrigerators and stoves. Now sell your clean aluminum for $0.30/lb, and charge people $20/ton for the clean sand you’ve created by crushing all of those salsa jars and bourbon bottles they foolishly didn’t want anymore. Better yet, charge the County $30/ton to use it as pipe bedding or spread it on the roads for traction. Let’s not even get into the fractions of a gram of gold and other PM in each obsolete VCR and 2-lb cell phone from the early 90′s.
You can also charge people for curbside pickup of their recycling or trash, you can have them pay you to take the trash, break open the bags, and get your money’s worth out of the 30-60% easily recyclable waste in each.
So yeah, if I’m running a private trash hauling company and charging contracted customers for pickup (which I understand doesn’t happen in NYC), then I see people doing the service for free and getting the residual money I was expecting from the steel and copper from that fridge…you bet I’m gonna try to stop it.
Ah, the Columbus Discharge, my hometown oracle. This so nicely illustrates why fewer and fewer of us read you.
For Sims Municipal Recycling of New York LLC, this situation is unfortunate. But to take a view of those who are stealing the appliances from the sidewalk, it is a perfect example of Peter Singer’s (a philosopher) utilitarian views.
Like the article states, the people who are stealing the items are not ones who are holding sticks and bags of cans over their shoulders; these people have trucks in order to transport the appliances. The statement shows that even though some people may have a car or truck to drive around in, it does not mean that they have all the money that they need to have a luxurious, or even healthy lifestyle. Therefore, it is definitely likely that those stealing the items are poor and need the extra money. If people are throwing the items out anyway, it is a bit obvious that they do not want it and deem it as trash.
Singer states that under utilitarianism, we should try to implement the outcome that brings the greatest utility or happiness to society– it tries to determine which people have the greatest need for some additional income. By taking an item that someone no longer wants or needs could translate to an extra dollar that might go to a life saving doctor’s visit for a poor person, while an extra dollar for a rich person may go toward buying a silk shirt.
I realize the situation is a bit more serious than just the rich (or one who can readily dispose of such appliances) and the poor, but that’s what came to mind when reading the article. I just imaged that it’s beneficial for those getting rid of the “trash” and beneficial for those who need money.
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