Berkeley recycling wars: 'Poacher-proof' bins and Black Panthers
http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/berkeley-recycling-wars-poacher-proof-bins-and-black-panthers-6709
November 17, 2010
Lance Williams
The city of Berkeley spent $2.5 million recently to buy 36,000
wheeled plastic recycling carts. Now everybody in town has a new way
to put out last week's newspapers and empty beer cans for curbside pickup.
The Berkeley Ecology Center, which has the $2.7 million annual
contract to pick up the city's recyclables, says the carts will be a
big improvement over the city-issued recycling bins they replace.
For one thing, the carts are better at "deterring poachers," as the
Berkeleyside news website reported.
Poachers are the poor people who get up before dawn and go around the
city swiping aluminum cans and other recycling detritus from the curb
before the Ecology Center's truck arrives.
They carry the stuff off in shopping carts or in the trunks of cars
and sell it.
That deprives the Ecology Center of income to underwrite the program,
which runs at a $1.5 million annual deficit, according to city records.
And so, for decades, the city every so often has tried to do
something to stop recycling poachers.
This latest gambit poacher-proof bins reminded me of the late
Eldridge Cleaver's last great hustle, "The Church of the Divine Greater Taker."
Cleaver, a quintessential 1960s character, was a confessed rapist and
the best-selling author of the prison essays "Soul on Ice." Paroled,
he became minister of information for Oakland's Black Panther Party
and ran for president in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
After a famous shootout with Oakland police, he fled to Cuba and
Algeria to avoid prosecution. He returned to the U.S. a decade later
and served some more prison time, meanwhile transforming himself into
a Republican, a born-again Christian, a Moonie and then a Mormon.
Perhaps inevitably, he wound up in Berkeley, living for a time on
Ashby Avenue a few blocks from my house.
As his trajectory showed, Cleaver was flexible about ideology, and he
was often inattentive about follow-through. But he was an amazing,
inflammatory speaker with an intuitive sense for agitprop of the most
infuriating sort. Sometimes I thought he would cook up his campaigns
just to show off his outrageous rhetorical skills.
And so, in 1989, Cleaver created the Greater Taker Recycling Service,
which he said was affiliated with a newly-formed church.
Cleaver said the Greater Taker would dispatch workers city-wide to
swipe and resell Berkeley's recycling in a systematic manner. It was
perfectly legal, he insisted either because of the project's
affiliation with the Greater Taker church, or because trash is trash
and nobody owns it once it has been discarded.
The city and the Ecology Center didn't like the project at all,
fearing financial ruin for the recycling service. As the Chronicle's
Pearl Stewart reported at the time, the Ecology Center set up a
meeting with the police and the city to discuss how to stop Cleaver.
"Nobody wants to see people arrested for stealing newspapers from the
curb," the story quoted the center's then-director as saying, ominously.
Cleaver professed to be outraged by the threat, and he had a
typically outrageous response. "Now the white man won't even let us
have his garbage," I recall him saying at the time.
Eventually Cleaver gave up on the Greater Taker, just as he had given
up on marketing "Cleavers," the men's pants he designed that came
with an Elizabethan-style codpiece. He got messed up on crack, and in
1994 was hospitalized after being badly beaten on Sacramento Street.
He died four years later, at age 62.
Since then, even without the Greater Taker, recycling poaching has
gone on unabated.
I understand the city's point in all this: the poachers only take the
stuff they can resell, so how are we going to pay to haul off the
other recyclables for which there's not much of a market?
But I understand Cleaver's point, too.
On Mondays I get up early and put the recycling out, and within
minutes there's somebody rooting through it. If they notice me,
poachers inevitably ask if it's OK for them to take the stuff.
Can you look some poor guy or gal in the eye at 6:30 in the morning
and tell them, 'No, you can't have my garbage?'
I can't.
The new bins aren't poacher-proof, anyway. You just pop the top and
reach down to get what you want that's the way it's done.
.
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