Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/13/new-york-city-has-a-bizarre-ritual-called-the-lost-valuables-search-where-residents-can-wade-through-muck-to-find-discarded-items-in-mountains-of-garbag.html
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You might get lucky and find some bitcoin!
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Well, I guess that depends on when one finds the bitcoin whether or not it has any value!
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Raw, as opposed to cooked?
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There’s a game show in there somewhere…
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ETA: Well, not me, Frank Drebin.
They have plenty of that as well.
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Detroit recently-ish tore down what had once been the world’s largest garbage inciner-, um, “trash-to-energy” facility. Other states and Detroit’s suburbs had been shipping in their trash to be burned there. Detroiters’ garbage went to landfills.
Turned out the damned thing was constantly exceeding limits for belching toxins, even after the operators were forced to install the smokestack scrubbers they’d “forgotten” during construction. People living for miles around the thing suffered from lung issues, kids got asthma, etc. Their homes - including indoors - and yards often were covered in particulate matter.
Constant complaints to the state and its environmental protection agency re: the overwhelming smell of gathered garbage for miles around, as well as the stink while it was burning, finally moved the state to do something. They told them to immediately clean up their act, doubtless because rich suburbanites were offended by the reek when they’d tried to go to area restaurants and bars.* Local reporters turned up a vast number of public complaints, and the many violations over the decades with which the environmental agency had charged them. The operator’s inaction re: those violations was also exposed. Not long after they finally took care of the piles of stinking garbage, the company said they could no longer afford to run the fucking thing and shut it down.
The city took it back, and began demolition soon after.
The damned thing had been built over the protests of pretty much everyone living within a five-mile radius, as well as everyone who didn’t think anyone should be forced to breathe garbage.
Detroit only recently adopted curbside recycling.
*We saw a Mercedes pull up and park across the street from a well-known bar/restaurant a mile from the incinerator. After a moment, four people emerged. They’d barely closed the doors when they made faces as they looked around. They had a V brief discussion, shook their heads, got back in, and drove away.
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The owner is given ninety minutes to wade through the muck to look for their discarded item, a protocol known as a Lost Valuables Search.
So rifling through your neighbors’ trash bins is illegal, but rifling through your neighbor’s already collected trash is just fine when you claim to have lost something?
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I used to tear up sensitive information from mail I was tossing and put it in the bags of cat litter before throwing them away. I seriously cannot begin to imagine how foul it must be to go through a truckload of filth.
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Once it’s in the trash bin and set out for collection it’s no longer private property. Law enforcement does not need a warrant to take the said trash. So seeing what the neighbors put out is legal, as long as the bin is at the curb (or wherever it goes in your area).
For you it may be “foul” but I’ll bet there’s at least one person for whom it’s a “fetish”.
“Hello, Department of Sanitation? I seem to have lost my wedding ring. Again. Yes, I know it’s the third time this week.”
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I was a child in Manhattan 50-ish years ago when there was a big garbage collection strike. I still remember the mountains of garbage that collected on sidewalks that week. Like a preview of WALL-E’s world.
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