In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/us/trash-pickers-san-francisco-zuckerberg.html
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.
Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.
But trash scavengers exist in many United States cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of American capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.
Mr. Orta, 56, sees himself as more of a treasure hunter.
“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”
Nick Marzano, an Australian photographer who publishes a glossy magazine, Mission Gold, which documents the world of trash pickers in San Francisco, estimates there are several hundred garbage scavengers in the city.
“It’s a civic service as I see it,” Mr. Marzano said. “Rather than this stuff going to landfill the items are being reused.”
Mr. Marzano says there is overlap among trash picking and homelessness and public drug use — the street conditions that have ranked at the top of residents’ concerns for several years. But he sees trash picking, and the spontaneous sidewalk markets that pop up in neighborhoods like the Mission and Tenderloin, as a form of entrepreneurship.
“It’s the primary form of income for people who have no other income,” he said.
