'Canners' working in downtown Boston, USA are concerned about the recently installed solar-powered trash compactors in the Hub.
For the uninitiated, canners are people who comb city streets and trashcans for bottles and aluminum cans left by passersby in an urban environment. Canners collect other's trash and turn it into a living for themselves.
Peter Azadian has been an active canner in Boston and Cambridge for the past five years, earning enough from the job to buy food and meager supplies for his life, not to mention discovering any number of useful items abandoned at landfills by their previous owners.
"Not only have I taken good, quality clothes out of the trash, but also quilts, blankets, and even some expensive copper wire," Azadian told Spare Change News.
Unfortunately for Azadian and other canners, the new bins do not allow for such rummaging. Manufactured by the Seahorse Power Company, the "Big Belly" bins look more like giant mailboxes than trashcans. Once refuse enters the receptacle, there is no way to retrieve it. Solar cells implanted at the top of the cans store electricity, which is then used to power a pneumatic press that flattens the contents of the can, making room for more refuse.
Ever since July, when the new trashcans were installed throughout downtown Boston, Azadian has seen a significant drop in the amount of business he does in that area. He watches as cans and bottles get dropped in the receptacles, but has no way to get them out.
"There's a problem with fastidiousness," he said, explaining his view on the introduction of the compactors. "The city wants things more sanitary, more visually appealing."
He also believes the compactors might embody discrimination.
"They probably don't want scruffy people digging in the barrels," Azadian surmised. "I think the city may be trying to squeeze out people who are supplementing their incomes with cans and bottles."
Not so, according to Tim McCarthy, spokesman for the Boston Department of Public Works (DPW). "We certainly want to help out some of the people who need these cans to subsidize their living," he said.
The DPW is in talks with James Poss, the founder and CEO of Seahorse, to provide recycling bins adjacent to every solar dumpster in the city. There is already one such bin currently being tested at a compactor in the Boston Common.
The recycling bins may give people the easy option to recycle, but Azadian is still concerned about myriad useful things people throw away every day. Without allowing canners to dig through the trash, the city may unwittingly upset an ecological balance in this urban environment.