Mr Wong was fourth in line to pay his bus fare when the driver spotted the black garbage bag he was carrying.
“Off! Off!” the driver shouted. “Nobody wants to smell your cans.”
The middle-aged man, who did not want to give his first name, complied. He stepped back onto the sidewalk near San Francisco’s Civic Center.
When the next bus arrived, he sneaked on through the rear door.
The streets in California may not be paved with gold, but the trash cans that line them are full of money. Industrious scavengers can redeem aluminum cans, plastic containers, and glass bottles for hard cash (5 or 10 cents apiece), thanks to the state’s 30-year-old container deposit program.
Canners are a common sight in the city with one of the highest rates of inequality in the country. Elderly Chinese men and women sort through trash cans in downtown San Francisco, wearing aprons, gloves, and protective sleeves to keep their arms clean, pulling neatly sorted carts behind them.
“This is my job,” said Carlos Peraza, a homeless man who had walked to One Planet Recycling center with a shopping cart full of bottles, the same center in San Francisco’s south-east corner where Mr Wong was going. “I never go to shelters. I never go the hospital. I survive by myself.”
“It is sufficient,” said Sergio Deviante, a homeless man who lives under the highway overpass near the recycling center. He said that he declines government assistance, preferring to survive on the $40-$50 he can make each day collecting containers.
“I live good,” he said. “I buy my cigarettes. I buy what I need.”
But the income that many Californians rely on from canning is imperiled by a crisis for recycling centers.
Over the past 18 months, hundreds of recycling centers in California have closed – about 20% of the total – reducing the ability of people across the state to access their refunds. The greatest blow came on 31 January, when a single company announced the closure of 191 centers across the state.
And Deviante’s local center could very well be next.
To read the full story, visit https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/can-collectors-california-recycling-centers-close.