VIDEO: A day in the life of a street recycler
We spent a day with a street recycler in Centurion to learn about his world.
Work, for Eric Mkhinda (37), starts at 04:30 sharp, after does his morning chores and sets off with his trolley.
He cannot afford to change clothes too often, and this morning his clothes still smell of his fire the previous night.
Mkhinda is a street recycler, colloquially known as a “trolley pusher”.
Like other trolley pushers, he sifts through dustbins for recyclable items, which he then processes and packs before selling them to recycling companies.
Mkhinda lives in a small squatter camp beneath the Gautrain bridge between Von Willich Avenue and Rabie Street. He sleeps on a piece of cardboard underneath a tree.
The camp is littered with cardboard and plastic bottles, ready to be sorted, packed and sold.
He has a set route for each day where the municipality is collecting trash from dustbins.
He made his trolley himself. It is a sort of frankentrolley made from a flat piece of plastic and the handle of a broken shopping trolley. Big, sturdy wheels keep it on the tar.
“Nobody else has a trolley like this. If anybody steals it I will recognise it,” he says with a cheeky grin.
He is a veteran recycler, active in Centurion for more than 13 years.
“Everybody in Lyttelton, even the police, know me. I do not cause trouble,” he said.
Rekord joined Mkhinda on his Tuesday morning route to see what he does, and how people treat him.
We leave the camp at 04:45, setting off towards Glover Avenue.
Mkhinda targets residential complexes, where dustbins are packed close together.
At the Emerald Park complex, the dustbins had not been put out yet, so Mkhinda rolled a cigarette and waited.
“I know the guys who search dustbins in this street.”
When the bins arrive, he starts his search.
“I never know what I will get. Sometimes I get a lot, sometimes nothing.”
He looks for cardboard, paper and plastic bottles.
“I get R2.50 a kilogram for PET plastic.”
He sifts through 19 dustbins and salvages several kilograms of cardboard, around 40 plastic bottles, two shirts, a pair of pants, two bags of cooked meat, two loaves of bread, three potatoes, two bottles of soda and a toy car.
He can sell any of those items, the car for R2, and the shirts and pants for R5.
He packs everything in a big bag, and sets off for the camp.
Rachel Isaacs, one of Eric’s fellow camp dwellers, looks after the camp while Mkhinda and the others collect items. She helps with sorting.
When everything is ready, she calls a recycling company to collect the items.
Isaacs says she makes around R800 a month. “It is not much, but it is enough to survive.”
The camp is a headache for residents of an adjacent complex.
Isaacs and Mkhinda were residents of the squatter camp in Von Willich Avenue that was recently torn down to make space for an office park.
According to ward councillor Clive Napier, he has received a petition to have the squatters removed.
He said demolishing the camp would not get rid of these people; it would only move them to another spot.
“I would want to see these recyclers regulated and helped,” he said.
Ward councillor Peter Sutton has suggested building a facility where recyclers can collect and sort through recyclable materials. He also endorses regulating them, and providing them with official designations and branded shirts.
Mkhinda said the only reason he does what he does, is that he cannot find any permanent work.
“I do piece jobs now and then, but not a lot. I am hungry – what else must I do?”
Though he doesn’t like the large amounts of food and plastic people waste, it provides him the only income he has.
“I sometimes think that the people who know me throw more away, because they are thinking of me,” he said grinning.
“Most people treat me well, and let me do my job without any problems.”
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