"Aluminating" Can Collecting

By Kate Flannery

Can collecting is a loud, grimy business. In order to soften the noise, it helps to hold the plastic bag away from your body; otherwise the stale and dirty beer cans will crash against your legs like clanging cymbals, an unwelcomed noise to the students sleeping off a hangover on Sunday morning.

It doesn't pay well either. Fifty cans collected from 8-9 a.m. means a little over two dollars an hour. A little over 100 will fit in a trash bag.

Around campus, one collector stands out as a "celebrity" in the community. Students at Santa Clara will tell you he's a scavenger, a harmless aluminum can collector or even a pest. Most know him as "the can man," although his California driver's license lists his name as Ho. It is on the couple of blocks that surround Santa Clara's campus that Ho is "employed." But he does not answer to an employer, nor does he have an hourly salary. His tools are his hands and a large plastic bag. His co-worker is his wife. Together, he and half a dozen others almost invisibly collect a majority of the recyclable aluminum cans, plastics and glass from the muddy grass and rotting trash bags of Santa Clara's off-campus inhabitants.

Most weekends, students leave behind a gold mine for Ho and the other collectors who convert the empty cans into money. They will get 5¢ for most glass, plastic and aluminum cans less than 24 ounces. Any larger, certified container will give them 10¢. Yet, based on the four or five bags they typically collect during one "shift," their earnings will most likely remain under the eight dollar minimum wage and not provide a stable source of income.

California boasts leading a recycling crusade with California Redemption Value. Through CRV, consumers can get money for turning in their recyclables to designated collection centers. Legislature passed the measure back in 1987, starting a movement now taking place in urban cities and smaller towns.

But even though the law makes recycling somewhat profitable, what the scavengers are doing is illegal if the recyclables they are collecting come from someone else's receptacles, said Yvette Sessions, the database manager at Misson Trail Waste Systems. Once the waste material is in the MTWS or Recology trash and recycling bins, it becomes the company or the city's property, she explained — meaning that the can collectors are stealing if they are getting materials from them.

Not only is it illegal to take things from the prescribed bins, but it also costs the company that works for both the city of Santa Clara and the university money. In reference to a company policy, Sessions said there are essentially two options: call the police or turn a blind eye. Sessions has called the police a few times ­— once as she was driving home and saw a pair of younger men literally getting out and dumping the entire contents of recycling bins into the trunk of their Mazda truck one by one. This was the kind of circumstance she felt warranted legal action. "There are a whole bunch of technicalities," she explained. Picking up $1,000 recycling bins and dumping contents out one after another is not only stealing, but can result in an issue of vandalism as well. Therefore, each violator has to be summed up depending on the circumstances. In the case of the can collectors at Santa Clara, most cans are left out on lawns or in bags, sometimes specifically for the collectors. Sergeant Rodriguez affirmed that the SCPD typically does not get involved unless students or residents voice dissent.

Sergeant Jerry Rodriguez, who is in charge of the Nuisance Depression Unit of the SCPD, points out that it's essentially "money that's free for the taking until someone calls and complains."

Based on Ho and the other's continued presence, this has yet to occur. On one sunny afternoon, Ho pulled up on Bellomy Street a little after 2 p.m. There, he saw his boys — the ones that acknowledge him. They clapped and hooted when he came up, throwing down their aluminum cans like rain from the roof. They'd saved them specifically for him throughout the day. In exchange for the student's cans, Ho occasionally gives them cigarettes, cleans their dishes or even takes out their trash. He doesn't speak English, but a nod or a thumbs up are usually enough to break the language barrier.

By early evening that day, Ho had collected over five large trash bags worth of recyclable material — anywhere between 600 or 700 cans. From there, he and his wife could turn them in to one of the 2,200 recycling centers all over the state, with three centers existing around the university alone. The aluminum cans are then sent to a mill and melted down and re-fabricated, explained Aaron Luu, a representative who has worked at Danny Recycling for about five or six years. If Ho takes his cans to Ranch Town Recycling Center, for example, he will get two dollars a pound, which equals about 30 cans. All he'll need to show is a California ID. At this rate, if Ho and his wife collect about 700 cans, the pair would get roughly $46 for a day's work — an insubstantial "wage" for daily life in the United States.

In countries like India, China and Paraguay, people live off of what they find in the trash alone. According to research conducted by Martin Medina, an international expert on the informal recycling sector, roughly one percent of the urban population sustains life through this method. However, for a majority of the can collectors at Santa Clara, survival doesn't seem to be the goal. Despite this, the idiom stands: one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Contact Kate Flannery at kflannery@scu.edu for more information about can collectors.