In Chinese cities, the demarcation between the “other waste” and “recyclable materials” garbage pails are meaningless. Most of the recycling is done by people who comb through the junk, pick out their recyclable materials of choice, and sell them to the junkyard. The most visible of these collectors are the bottle collectors.
I started paying more attention to these urban roamers with the beat up giant plastic bags on their backs after reading a post in Shanghaiist last year, which suggested that if you want to give money to the poor and make sure that they actually receive it (since most street beggars are forcibly organized by “the mob” and don’t get to keep their earnings) you should stuff a few yuan in your empty plastic bottle before you toss it into the street side bin. This method is a good compliment to buying a few extra baozi when you go out and giving them to beggars, which is what I usually do.
On my way to the gym every day I see the same bottle collector somewhere in between the Kecun subway station and the gym. I have literally seen her at least once every day since I started going over there. She, like most bottle collectors I’ve seen, is an old lady in her 60’s or 70’s with lank gray hair and a slightly hunched back. She makes the same rounds repeatedly, digging through the cans with her bare hands, squashing the bottles under her plastic sandals and tossing them into her huge wrinkled plastic bag. It seems that she always has full bags, because the Kecun area is a big transportation hub and the subway station is attached to a large supermarket that is busy from morning to late at night.
A few days ago I was sitting on a ledge surrounding flower beds outside of a 7-11 near the gym eating my tea eggs when I saw the bottle lady take a seat down at the other corner. It was almost 10 PM and she looked tired. When I got up to leave I took my empty bottle out of my bag and handed it to her, she smiled when she took it from me. As I was walking away I got hit with an idea, maybe I should get on friendly terms with her and find out more about bottle collecting. There are so many questions I’d like to ask, starting with:
-When did you start bottle collecting and how did you get the idea to do it?
-What made you choose this area and make it your turf?
-Do you ever have problems with other bottle collectors trying to edge in on your turf? If so, how do you deal with them?
-On average, how many bottles do you collect a day?
-When and where do you sell your bottles?
Each area has its regular bottle collectors, so it wouldn’t be too hard to hang around and eventually start talking to them (if they speak Mandarin!). It would be interesting to see how these people came to bottle collecting. Most seem to be poor, but not homeless, elderly women and I’d be interested to know what their circumstances are like. I wonder if they have children or not, or if their husbands are still alive.
Then there are the part-time bottle collectors who are usually better dressed, and finally the people who seem to just pull out a few bottles from trash cans on their way home from work. There is also a young mentally handicapped man who lives near me inside the SYSU campus who I see collecting bottles a few days a week, always with a cigarette hanging precariously from the corner of his mouth. I’d like to hear their stories too.
Do I feel a new side-project coming on?
