With reference to your article “Massive blow to income” about waste pickers in the Northsider of 14 July:
I am extremely frustrated by waste pickers. The bin assembly point is right in front of my house and the waste pickers remove everything from the bins to get to the recyclable material and then only put back the bulk rubbish, leaving behind lots of small pieces that get stuck on the road surface or blow over to my premises. For three days around pick-up days I have to live with the smell. To make it worse, some bins are left open and at times large dogs get to drag rubbish from the bins. Besides my compost bin for kitchen waste, I have three separate bins. I keep the recyclables for the recycle truck thus I hardly ever put out more than half a bag of waste.
I understand your concern on behalf of the waste pickers, but leaving everything up to them makes our residents lazy and does not encourage the recycling ideology.
It just feels if we are doing the right things the wrong way around in this country, encouraging more problems with a culture of extreme consumption and waste generation.
If we still want to help the waste pickers, let’s put out the sorted bags for them to collect, and stop the recycle truck, but then they must collect everything in the bag, and recycling has to be implemented, with strict laws to discourage digging in bins.
