14 Held in Recycling Fraud Case. Cali/Mexico scam.

LA TIMES ^ | October 23, 2002 | By Virginia Ellis, Times Staff Writer

[homeschool mama]

I'll check into that--thank you for your source. My husband is in the recycling industry...I've emailed him about this...but he's out on an audit and won't be able to check figures for a few days.

[Great Dane]

#19........ All I am saying is, if it's worth stealing to make money on, why is it not making money for professional recyclers. ?

By the way, we are great recyclers, only have one garbage bag every 4-5 weeks, we have 4 composters and a green cone.

[Rocksalt]

Here in my neck of the woods,there are private companys who have the garbage trucks dump the trash in their yard,and then a bunch of guys in space suits pull all the stuff worth money like aluminum,cardboard and such out and they sell them.They have been operating for many years.Funny too,they set up this operation right next to the county landfill,and I'm sure the county loses revenue due to this.

[lmr]

What you are describing is something called a "Dirty Murf", this is the system of recycling we are proposing.

[Rodney King]

First of all, this is not that ingenious, and Kramer and Newman on Seinfield attempted a similar scam by trying to take their NY cans and redeem them in MI where they go for 10 cents, rather than NY's 5.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this, except that they were taking welfare checks while doing it.

[Rodney King]

Should read: First of all, this is not that ingenious, as Kramer and Newman...

[berkeleybeej]

I hope the Berkeley recyclers are investigated.

BTW - supposedly this California recycling setup doesn't cost the taxpayer ANYTHING (ha). Consumers pay a deposit at the time of purchase that is supposed to go into the recycling payback fund. The only way it would cost taxpayers is if more containers are redeemed than were sold.

It would be interesting to see what percentage of containers sold in California are being redeemed?

[dennisw]

Personally, I don't have a problem with this, except that they were taking welfare checks while doing it.
....................

It sure seems that Cali has a problem with it.

[Rocksalt]

Dirty Murf? I got a laugh out of that name.Why's it called that?

[Rocksalt]

I see from the article these folks were cashing in the cans and bottles by weight.I'm sure the reason they were able to get away with this was because the loads came in in trucks and the bottles were not scruntinized closely.In my state aluminum cans are worth 5 cents,and they have to be counted and sorted to get any money out of them.Obviously the system of redeeming the value by weight opens up alot of opportunitys for fraud.In my state they would have gotten aluminum scrap weight for the cans-alot less. Bottles are worth virtually nothing here.