View From The Stalls 3
View From The Stalls 3 Saw a sign on the side of a refuse truck the other day. It read “illegal dumping costs the city R350m per year”, and I thought, wow! that figure could be double were it not for the waste pickers, the men and women who scrummage through your bins looking for trash they could sell for recycling. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones you regularly chase away with threats of castration if they ever came within 5m of your bin ever again! Well my friends, those “bin scratches” as they are sometimes referred to, are an integral component of the informal economy and apart from earning a living by exposing themselves to extreme health risks, they perform a vital and thankless ecological service by ridding the landfill sites of recyclables. What have we done today to save our planet? I engaged a “bin Scratcher” the other day. Must have been about 5am, I had just put out my bin when he traipsed across to me. whistling no known tune, he greeted me with a toothless