Men’s work?
Are you more likely to have XY chromosomes if you collect bottles, cans and scrap metal? To the casual observer, it sure seems like it. Look at who’s pushing or towing carts full of scavenged material and you’ll be hard-pressed to spot a woman.
To someone who has worked with Hamilton’s homeless for years, it appears that way, too.
“We don’t see a lot of women doing that. In fact, in my experience here I have never seen a woman doing that here,” said Denise Brooks, executive director of Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre.
“I think they’re doing other things, but that’s not one of them,” Brooks added.
Social planner Deirdre Pike says homeless women, as a demographic, are getting older. That means more mobility issues.
“That would eliminate dumpster diving right there,” says Pike, who works for the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton.
Last year, The Globe and Mail published a feature about how a group of Chinese women have collected bottles in Toronto for years.
But in St. John’s, N.L., Michelle Porter says she only found men when she studied local bottle collectors. A 2009 survey by University of Victoria geographers found of 90 homeless binners who responded, “the majority” were men between 40 and 59 years of age. services, Pagliari said.
Cleanliness is also a goal of the bylaw.
“In addition, some individuals who remove materials from recycling containers tend to make a mess, leaving litter in neighbourhoods, which is an additional cleanup cost for our community,” she said.
The city fields about 30 complaints about waste pickers a year. DARRIN ARNOLD- HINE tries not to cause trouble.
In Corktown, the homeless man sits on a ledge puffing on a cigarette near an apartment building’s garbage bin after nightfall.
Arnold-Hine says he has mostly collected cans and bottles in his shopping cart since a fire forced him to leave his apartment.
The soft-spoken 30-year-old says he tries to leave things tidy.
“I don’t take out the garbage bag and dump it everywhere and go through it. I just keep it in the bin. Light searching. I don’t really do too much heavy searching.”
Matt Thompson doesn’t think trash pickers should have to hide in the shadows. “It is good, noble work.” The Beasley resident enjoys a friendly relationship with a man who drops by his place to collect empties once a week. He leaves a third recycling box out for him.
For Richard Melowsky, 54, the arrangement is “no big deal,” but the bottles and cans do help.
“It’s sort of pocket money, really,” says Melowsky, who receives a disability pension.
Thompson, a community developer with the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton, doesn’t see this as charity.
“We view each other as neighbours.”
And small gestures between neighbours go a long way, he says.
“When you have strong relationships, that’s when people thrive.”
Matthew Edgeworth can attest to what happens when the opposite is true.
The 34-year-old homeless man recalls diving into a maggot-infested trash bin to save a few precious reminders of his former life.
“I had three pictures of my son that I hadn’t seen in two-and-a-half years,” he says, standing by a shopping cart full of bottles, cans and a broken bicycle on a recent blazing-hot afternoon downtown.
Those photos wound up in the trash after a superintendent went after him for searching an apartment’s garbage bin.
The man attacked him and tossed his few belongings into the trash, Edgeworth says.
“I got the pictures back, but I was just covered in dog s---, cat piss and cat litter, maggots … It was traumatizing.”
IT DOESN’T HAVE to be so ugly. This is what a research paper by University of Victoria geographers says about binning.
“Who are our informal recyclers? An inquiry to uncover crisis and potential in Victoria, Canada” calls for government policy to embrace the B.C. capital city’s binners.
The 2009 study takes note of the rough edges that frame the marginalized work.
“As scavenging through garbage bins remains an illegal activity in British Columbia, their actions are not without confrontation,” notes the paper whose principal investigator was Jutta Gutberlet.
A collaborative approach with government and business could help improve working and living conditions while safeguarding the environment, the paper proposes.
“Co-operative recycling practices can be part of an integrated strategy to reduce urban poverty and environmental contamination.”
As it stands, collecting junk is no walk in the park.
Take Stanley, a Hamilton dumpster diver who says he’s known as “Old Man Stan,” despite being only 58.
He pulls a small, plastic stool out of a cart attached to his e-bike while resting in a shady spot under a tree outside Wesley Urban Ministries on Ferguson Avenue North.
“I use (the stool) to get in the Dumpster because I’m getting old,” says Stanley, whose last name The Spectator isn’t printing because he doesn’t want his daughter to know he scavenges.
“Don’t forget I’ve got to drag this stuff around and it’s not easy. Everyone steals it.”
Stanley says he suffers from a host of serious health problems including cirrhosis of the liver. He’s also having trouble kicking a crystal meth habit.
The slight, frail man’s health and addiction struggles fit an all-too-familiar
“Those people are working pretty hard for not a lot of money, I’ll tell you that.” IAN BARTELS PRESIDENT, BUDGET IRON AND METALS
Society can be “quite pejorative” in judging how people wind up without shelter, says Denise Brooks, director of Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre.
pattern among homeless people.
In 2016, Hamilton participated in a co-ordinated point-in-time homeless count involving 32 communities across Canada.
The local effort found 38 per cent of 504 people surveyed reported having a serious medical condition, which was twice the rate of the overall Canadian population.
The survey also found 38 per cent reported substance use issues, while 42 per cent pointed to mental health problems.
The rate of “co-occurring” conditions, called “tri-morbidity” was 15 per cent.
THE STIGMA of homelessness
dies hard.
Society can be “quite pejorative” in judging how people wind up without shelter, says Denise Brooks, executive director of Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre.
That also goes for what homeless people do to survive, including dumpster diving, which offers no guarantees like other work.
“If the stuff isn’t out there, it’s not out there. There’s nothing much you can do about it.”
The Victoria, B.C., study found the rewards of binning are meagre.
Out of 98 homeless survey respondents, 67 said binning was their sole source of income. Most of them earned an average of between $10 and $30 a day.
Most said they spent between five and seven days a week binning with many reporting four- and six-hour days.
While solidarity can help lead to opportunities, joining a collective isn’t for everyone.
In St. John’s, N.L., a small group of bottle collectors have resisted efforts to structure their work, says Michelle Porter, who holds a PhD in geography.
“The majority of people who benefit from it don’t want to organize formally,” said Porter, who studied the small group of men while at Memorial University.
The men are known by name in the downtown neighbourhood where they make the rounds, she said.
“We now have curbside recycling here, but people will keep out their bottles to pass on to them.”
The bottle collectors she got to know in 2012 were also worried about being penalized for earning unreported income on top of welfare, Porter noted.
In Durand, Joseph Parent pushes his cart, brimming with glass and aluminum, up the gentle slope of Bold Street.
When he’s done, Parent will hoof it several blocks home to his room on Keith Street, off Wentworth Street North.
He’ll park his cart in the yard for the night. The next day, he’ll cash in.
Parent says his lone-wolf experience has been positive.
In fact, here among the highrise condos and stately heritage homes, he’s a known quantity.
“There’s a lot of people who won’t put out their bottles and cans until they see me coming,” Parent says radiating with pride.
“So I have a lot of regular people.”
The bylaw making it illegal to pick through waste and recyclables is meant to safeguard revenue generated from the city’s recycling program.