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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, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday April 07 2019, @03:53PM (3 children)
> Unfortunately, for every TV, etc. that someone like you was able to salvage, repair, and reuse, there were tens of thousands just going into landfill.
Even if that is true, the directive just made it worse. Before, some of it was being salvaged by people like me (and I was not the only one, there was an entire community of people doing this), whereas after it was all going to the landfill. As was found out recently, all the "recycled" stuff that was disposed of according to legislation like WEEED, was actually not recycled, but just dumped in China/India and third world country landfills, to much local environmental pollution.
Plus the stuff that was deliberately destroyed went from being something reusable, to being nothing but garbage.
The destruction and recycling of items is in every way worse than reusing, if you consider impact of the environment and energy use. Even if item is properly recycled, you would need to ship the recycling items to a recycling plant, then energy to split the device into its constituent compounds and elements, refine and reprocess the raw material, form it into raw stock, ship it to a factory, melt it down again, and then fabricate another product, which than has to be shipped to a store, bought, shipped to the new end user, and then used. Each step takes up energy, resources and materials, impacting the environment.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do, is just repair/reuse the original item. Recycling only reduces the environmental impact of raw material mining, nothing else. That is a good start, but it is less than a quarter of the environment and energy impact of the entire modern production process.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday April 08 2019, @02:40PM (1 child)
Have you ever considered that there some "people like you" might not be quite "like you"? Perhaps not everybody is as competent at repairing advanced electronics as you apparently are.
It's all very well digging hardware out of the rubbish and making repairs until some overconfident amateur makes a wiring mistake and electrocutes someone / burns the building down.
This is why they don't let you pick junk off the dump any more. It boils down to safety and liability.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @09:33PM
What? Your argument makes no sense AT ALL. Not unless people are forbidden from repairing their OWN devices.
I'm just as likely to burn down your apartment building with a TV that I've been gifted from a neighbour as one I cull from the sidewalk.
Use your brain. Unixnut did. You just look like an idiot, when you say idiotic things like you did above.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @09:30PM
you're one of my new soylentil favorites, unixnut.
your way of doing things is what I look for in every meatspace person I let into my spheres.
Good on you for having a brain and using it to simultaneously improve your own lot and the planet's!