Archive for June, 2010
Redemption
I shot the cover story for this week’s East Bay Express. The article is about the rising cost of the curbside recycling program in Berkeley, as well as the “poachers” who raid the bins and take the cans to recycling centers and redeem them for cash.
I had always thought that the curbside recycling programs paid for themselves by selling the recyclable materials. But it turns out that they’re not free, and never have been. We pay for the recycling pickup along with the garbage bill, but the bill isn’t itemized, so nobody knows how much it costs.
To some extent, I can sympathize with residents who don’t want to pay more for curbside recycling when the bins are just getting raided by scavengers. But I have a lot more sympathy for the guy who has to go out and collect cans and bottles in order to feed his family.
I can’t help thinking how great it would be if there were some way to turn this situation into a real jobs program. If we could actually employ people to walk around with carts and collect the bins instead of driving around in big diesel powered trucks, that would be a much greener way of collecting the trash and recyclables, right?
Anyway, I took a lot of photos for this assignment. Here are some of my favorite shots and some outtakes that didn’t make it into the article:
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- Martin Bourque of the Berkeley Ecology Center.
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- Martin Bourque of the Berkeley Ecology Center.
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- A truck full of mixed recycling is dumped at the Berkeley Ecology Center.
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- Glass bottles, sorted by color, at the Berkeley Ecology Center.
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- A pile of glass bottles at the Berkeley Ecology Center.
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- Carlos Campos collects bottles and cans from restaurants and bars.
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- Michael Chevalier collects recyclables up and down San Pablo Avenue.
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- Raymond Graham collects recyclables from Dumpsters and bins in Oakland.
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- Berkeley resident Ann Riley has taken to locking up her recycling until the last minute.
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- Ben Bartlett, owner of Bartlett’s Organic Coffees & Teas, a coffee shop in downtown Berkeley, and heads up the subcommittee on poaching.
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- Ben Bartlett, owner of Bartlett’s Organic Coffees & Teas, a coffee shop in downtown Berkeley, and heads up the subcommittee on poaching.
Monahan Paper Co.
I took these while out scouting some locations around Jack London Square.
For some reason, probably because it’s so weathered and decayed, this building reminded me of ghost-towns I’ve seen in Nevada. It seemed to me like it belonged in the middle of a desert or wasteland.
