We don’t usually think of it as a form of abandon, taking out the trash, or recycling maybe, but not abandon. Still, we buy the bottles and cans and stuff that comes in cardboard, and when we’re finished with it, we usually rid ourselves of it, never to see it again.
If you live in a larger sized metropolis that has even a half decent recycling program, you’ve probably been witness to a curious subculture. Spend enough time in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and you’ll run across someone towing gigantic garbage bags filled to the point short of rupture with cans (aluminum, tin, etc.) and bottles (glass, plastic, etc.). Mostly the bags spill over the sides of shopping carts, although occasionally you’ll see the impressive act of four or five bags precariously balanced on bicycles with the rider carefully wedged in with just enough room to peddle. You’ll see them plodding down sidewalks and sometimes right down the middle of the street.
People of indiscriminate age, sex, and ethnicity try to carve out a living by scrounging through recycling bins across the city. Once they’ve packed up enough as they physically can handle of the remains of our fleeting purchases, they trudge (many times for miles), not to the city recycling centers, but to privately run outfits where they get paid by the pound for whatever they can get their hands on.
Not all the people who come here are homeless or destitute , although there is a percentage of people that are. That said, head into any of these beehive recycling places and you might get the impression that the people who show up regularly, fall into the category of “the lowest rung” on the societal ladder (ever see someone in an Armani suit drive up in a shiny Bentley with a trunk full of soda cans? I think not).
If you were to hold this assumption as fact, you’d be missing something, namely a lack of abandonment on the part of the people who make this their living. However these people arrived at this particular station in life is not something that is regularly volunteered or readily apparent, but that they have yet to abandon a personal sense of purpose is plain to see. That most people who live more comfortably don’t bother to give this part of our culture a second thought is a sad abandonment of compassion.
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Other notable posts on the theme
Filed under: Photo Challenges Tagged: 2812 photography, Abandoned, Black and White, FujiFilm X-E1, Pete Rosos, photography, postaday, Recycling Subculture, san francisco bay area, The Daily Post, Weekly Photo Challenge, Wordpress
