Garbage Combine Leaves No Scraps

On Jan. 11, you ran an article titled “City Rooting Out Recycling Scavengers.” It was all about the city’s efforts to stop people from digging in the trash.

A couple of years ago the city of Ventura, Harrison Industries and Gold Coast Recycling formed a private/public partnership. The merging of these unlike entities has formed a strange corporate beast.

This juggernaut lives, smells and eats recycling. And we feed it. How you may ask? Simple: First the city encourages its citizens to help our endangered environment by separating our trash into conveniently supplied barrels, before Harrison removes it for us. Then, presto! The remains of what citizens of Ventura have bought with their own money and paid a fee to have hauled away has now been transformed into the gainful private property (or food) of the juggernaut. It is a big, lucrative business. As a business, it is primarily worried about just one thing--profit.

Through this paradigm, individual trash harvesters are seen as grubby little thieves with their hands in the cookie jar. The juggernaut wants these have-nots driven from her table until she is done foraging. If they don’t retreat, these trash harvesters will be caught in the large, merciless gears of her unrelenting corporate combine. Her bottom line falls like a sharp guillotine through any silly notion like sympathy.

BYRON MOLINE, Ventura