71–80 of 419 posts
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For whatever reason HN nerds love stories about recycling even though this family is clearly poor and not making good financial decisions.
I like these types of stories that show the harsh economic realities of many in America. It was not the case many years ago, when they could become an American citizen by working hard enough. Now they are servants, beholden to the corrupted members of our government.
What other job do you suggest they could be doing?
I am curious: if you collect cans for a living, do you qualify for government assistance? Is it possible that Jessica Yauri receives aid earmarked for children so they can get proper nutrition, via her parents? She does not mention if she qualifies for lunch assistance. Also, I am assuming that she goes to a public school where she doesn't have to pay to attend. It is also not clear if she receives further aid in sup…
I am a little bit annoyed with the direction of your argument. To counter argue, it is obvious in this case that the value that you get from this “underclass” is more that the cheap labour, it’s also an educated young person with passion and depth of experiences that you would struggle to get from “people already here” alone. What has been coming out “in the wash” for the duration of your history, I assume you commen…
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Why is this unsustainable? You would still have to pay for the drink and deposit before you get the deposit back.
For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid. Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change t…
My family used to do this all the time when we were kids. We'd go along the ditches on the side of the road and make a family outing of it on weekends. At the beach my brother and I would drag big plastic garbage bags around and collect as much as we could from people who were happy to help some kids out and also happy to be rid of the bottles and cans. You could make some decent coin at it, but that was also in the…
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It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always giv…
I've always been surprised that other states do not have bottle returns inside stores. What I used to routinely do in Michigan -- bring some cans with me to the grocery store -- I have never done in California, since you have to travel to a recycling center with limited hours.
What kind of hourly salary can you earn from collecting cans? I always assumed it was well below minimum wage.
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Why is this unsustainable? You would still have to pay for the drink and deposit before you get the deposit back.
For one, it would increase the attractiveness of fraud where the same bottle is sold in multiple jurisdictions with different deposit rates. Instead of collecting trash across the border, buy cans there by the truckload, bring them back across state lines, empty them and redeem them for the "deposit" you never paid. Of course, there are some plausible technological or political solutions to this. But it does change t…
This is how it works in Germany. You pay a deposit on every bottle. To get your money back requires a machine to recognise each bottle/can as legitimate, based on the bar code.
Now, yes, people could print stickers with fake bar codes on… but I don’t think that would work well at the scale of the major fraud operation you’re envisaging…
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I don't think you are curious, rather you're making a not so subtly veiled point against immigration which is wholly inappropriate in the context of this thread.
I think it is a 100% valid statement. Are the authors parents, or is the author even valid to reside in the USA permanently? And before anyone cries "racist", my background is 100% similar to the author in question. It's a shame that in the USA we have people who never really learned the Spanish language or culture and go on with "latinx" which is mocked even on twitter, to people who protect people that may have ent…
This is why I have always thought that can and bottle deposit prices should keep up with inflation: to give the collectors a living wage.
The cost of drinks largely hasn't increased in line with inflation, so you'd very quickly arrive at an unsustainable situation where returning a can/bottle would give you more money than it cost you to buy it.
The reason the redemption value has not gone up much is that people would balk at paying so much for the goods upfront, IMO. Adding 20¢ per can would add nearly $5 to the cost of a 24-pack or soda. The cost per ounce of soda drops dramatically when you buy in volume, so the redemption value would grow to be a substantial portion of the total cost for larger purchases.