From “Ode on a Grecian Pile of Crap: A Visit to Athen’s Secret and Massive Garbage Town,” by Tassos Brekoulakis; photos by Freddie F., in the February Issue of Vice.
It is estimated that Greece currently has between 80,000 and 100,000 rag collectors and metal peddlers. Many of them live in the Greek capital. Organized, they could paralyze the industry and force the price of iron rods through the roof, creating a financial crisis in real estate across the country. This, of course, will never happen.
The work done by scrap collectors has not been included in any environmental study. But in the course of a given day they tidy hunks of the urban landscape, doing a job that should be the responsibility of the municipalities or the state. The police mostly look the other way. The scrappers are not licensed garbage collectors, and they usually steal most of their electricity and water. Rodents breed where they live, feasting on their refuse and sometimes on their children. The police wouldn’t have a place to put them all even if they had any interest in putting them somewhere. “No one goes where these people go to collect trash,” says Christos, “and where they live is off-limits and impossible to reach unaccompanied.”Has a full-on ecological/sociological study of rag picking ever been done anywhere? I feel like this writer is right on, that scrap collectors perform an essential metabolic/public health service in many societies, processing and refining trash that would otherwise overwhelm the state or just be put straight into landfills.
I think it’s impossible to learn anthropology at UCSC and not be fascinated with activities at the edges and borders of cultures and structures.
Here in San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a group of men who drive an ancient pickup truck around the neighborhood. The truck has high, make-shift walls attached to the side of the bed and cardboard is broken down and stacked in the back over six feet high.
What I love about these guys is their consistency: they pick up more often than the municipalities and stores in the area leave their cardboard flattened and stacked for them on the curb at the end of the day.
This contrasts with the official effort by the city: recycle bins built into the top of trashcans are often bottomless (allowing cans to fall into the main bin) and never collected (my former boss once asked our Mayor if the city ever collected items from them: they don’t). So here in SF, a city that enjoys a comically ‘green’ reputation outside its borders, the people scrapping out a living by maintaining the waste of our community often keep us from living among detritus.
