A couple of years ago I started noticing elderly Chinese or Asians going around Sydney’s upper North Shore with prams or supermarket trolleys filled with cans or plastic bottles. Having been a scavenger in Tondo one time in my life I recognized exactly what they were doing.
These old Chinese folks were going around segregating trash so they could sell them for their return value, amounting to maybe $20 for a day’s work. To a Tondo scavenger first world garbage is essentially gold. We used to come back with mostly paper, rags, some bottles and cans.
The paper, cans, bottles and wires got segregated at the scavenger warehouse. Long fiber paper was “Waste 1”. Short fiber was “Waste 2”. Bottles were crushed and cans pounded flat and sold to the paper mills, glass factories and steel mills.
If a Tondo scavenger saw first world trash he’d be goldstruck. The Chinese immigrants to Australia can afford houses, cars, electronics. But they are not beneath working for $20 extra bucks by scavenging through garbage. This is why China is so admirable and terrifying.