Digging for trash treasures
Digging for trash treasures keeps this man living and eating.
Street entrepreneurs start digging for ‘gold’ as early as sunrise every day of the week.
After searching for nearly six months to find a dustbin digger who is willing to talk on the record, the News found Josef Mqweba, pushing his trash treasures as he makes his way along Exchange Road in Mindalore.
The trash treasures Josef and thousands others like him search for include plastics, crates, tin, zink, glass and other recyclable material.
“I search for basically any material which can be recycled for money,” Josef explained as he puts down his overloaded wheelbarrow to talk to the News.
What was amazing to see it the amount of recyclable material Josef loaded on his wheelbarrow.
He explained to the News that he gets up early every morning to start digging in dustbins from 5am and will continue to work to around 9am, just before the rubbish removal trucks come to collect the trash.
When asked about the disgusting smell the dustbins may contain, Josef simply brushes it off as he has gotten use to the smell of ‘fresh garbage’.
“Because finding a job is very difficult, I started collecting recyclable materials and selling it to generate an income.”
He also described the collected items as ‘no stink’ because he washes the items before handing them in to a company in Luipaardsvlei.
Josef has been working as a street entrepreneur for over three years now and will collect the recyclable goods from Monday to Friday and store it at his house in Kagiso and will then take the whole week’s items in on a Friday to be recycled.
When asked about the money made from digging for trash Josef simply said,”Yes I make enough money from this to live and eat”.
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