From the NY Post:The city Department of Sanitation’s police force has beefed up neighborhood patrols to combat the theft of valuable recyclable scrap metal carted to the curb.
“It’s a continuing problem, one that the department is very aggressively trying to combat,” said Vito Turso, a spokesman for the Sanitation Department, noting that old ovens, refrigerators and air-conditioning units command high prices at scrap yards these days.
Last year, a whopping 46 percent of the appliances put out for recycling were not at the location at the time of pickup — apparently taken by roving scrap-metal thieves.
That’s a jump from 36 percent the previous year. So far, for 2012, the rate is at 43 percent, or roughly 11,000 missed pickups.
The city has a contract with Sims Metal Management to recycle the scrap — and the city gets a cut of Sims’ action in return.
Sims has estimated it loses up to $4 million a year from the thievery, meaning city coffers are getting hit hard, too.
7 comments:
Well if it didn't take many days for them to show up when your appliance is sitting at the curb a lot of this could be avoided.
What theivery! Let the free market decide. City contractors take forever and rules rules rules.
The FREE market guys pickup sometimes within a few minutes. Just another taxpayer service we dont need.
this is CRAP. the law is that garbage belongs to whoever wants it. once you abandon an item on the sidewalk it is no longer your property and it's a case of finders keepers. what this means is that the Corporation Counsel thinks they can rewrite the law. They should be ashamed. People don't have jobs. let them sell the old appliances for scrap metal.
Screw that! Let these folks pick up what ever. The city collects 5Million and spends 10 Million to enforce a law to stop picking up garbage - go figure!
Only in New York!
Everybody is right What gives the city the right to own the garbage and make money?
this is fucking bullshit. i hope mayor dinkins doesn't get re-elected
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