What Do You Do For A Living ?

Or What Do You Have To Do To Live ?

There are millions of people in South Africa. women and men, who have made it their living to dig through other people's trash and waste that is deposited in black bags outside on the street for collection. 

It is the same scenario on each and every day in South Africa. In every city and in each suburb, affluent or poor, depending on the week day when the trash is collected.

As early as five or six o'clock in the morning, before the trucks come, people start searching the trash for plastic bottles and material that can be recycled and for things that can be kept for private use. The list of things that can be re-used for private comsumption is long ranging from old garden chairs, left over food and half smoked cigarettes to card board boxes. Nothing is excluded.

South Africa is just beginning to make a small step into the direction of an " organized waste separation and waste managemnt system ". Private Recycling companies buy the empty bottles and plastic trash that are collected by the people who search the waste. 

The money derived from this activity is often their only income.

The gap in South-Africa between the rich and the poor has become deeper during the last decade.

And this is a way not to steel or starve.

What many South Africans have to do to live.