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In San Francisco, Making a Living from Your Billionaire Neighbor's Trash

posted by martyb on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:34PM   
from the garbage-in-garbage^W-money-out? dept.

takyon writes:

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".

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Original Submission

• Re:The US is starting to look more and more... Re:The US is starting to look more and more... (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:11PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:11PM (#825819)

  Yes, khallow, that's precisely what we think!!!

  In b4 reduce, reuse, recycle. Dumpster diving is not a safe or efficient way to accomplish this. You're basically saying, "Eh, who cares? Capitalism does the 3 Rs just fine. That's what homeless people who are denied even basic human dignity are for." Homelessness is a desirable and healthy part of society, if you're khallow!

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• Re:The US is starting to look more and more... (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:18PM

  by khallow (3766) on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:18PM (#825820) Journal

  Dumpster diving is not a safe or efficient way to accomplish this.

  Compared to what? Everything has its costs and inefficiencies. At that point, it's more efficient than sending the thing to the landfill, right?

  You're basically saying, "Eh, who cares? Capitalism does the 3 Rs just fine. That's what homeless people who are denied even basic human dignity are for."

  Should we take away yet another way for the homeless to get basic human dignity? Why are you so cruel to the homeless people, AC?

  Homelessness is a desirable and healthy part of society, if you're khallow!

  Sigh, read the summary

  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.

  So not homeless who are dumpster diving this time.

  Parent

• Re:The US is starting to look more and more... (Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:47PM

  by HiThere (866) on Sunday April 07 2019, @04:47PM (#825840) Journal

  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.

  Parent