In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor's Trash
Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg's $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.
There's a child's pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg's house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg's bin.
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.
One Zuck's trash is another man's "like new".
(Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:47PM
The problem is that there appears to often *be* no safe and efficient way to recycle. FWIW, GoodWill Industries has stopped training people to repair things. And they won't even resell things that are visibly used. Much of what is put in "recycling" is just dumped into a garbage dump AFTER spending time sorting it so that it *should* be reusable. Etc.
A lot of this isn't transparent, but I've become somewhat disenchanted with recycling as repeated stories have come out about how it just wasn't actually happening.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.