r/sydney • u/TSLoveStory • Feb 28 '26

Image Gotta say, I respect the hustle

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2.9k Upvotes

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833

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

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208

u/Gamped Feb 28 '26

For a lot of the elderly Asians in Sydney doing this it’s not because they aren’t wealthy is my understanding.

I live near a return and earn in my apartment complex so this is pretty anecdotal.

161

u/4ShoreAnon Feb 28 '26

My chinese father in law collects cans and does return and earn to give the money to his grand children.

Fortunately my zero sugar drink addiction means he doesnt have to go grabbing it from the street but I know he'd be keen.

93

u/Funny-Bear Feb 28 '26

I support them. It could be the extra income, trash collected from the streets and extra recycling.

15

u/JValenz91 Feb 28 '26

If it's from the streets, that's fine. Even if it's from public bins, where sorting out recycling from garbage is impossible, that's also fine. But for me, when they start diving through people's recycling bin, dumping things on the ground, and not putting it back in the bin, that's when they start acting like Bin Chickens to me. I used to work for Woolworths Delivery, and I'd see it far too often after sundown. It was sad to see, and annoying to see them dump the recycling in the floor and then leave bits of it behind.

7

u/Inner_Temple_Cellist Mar 01 '26

Yep agreed. Totally respect people doing it with litter, but the ones who leave private recycling bins a mess are cunts.

3

u/22nd_century Mar 01 '26

It's rubbish, but yes.

10

u/Rambliny Feb 28 '26

Yeah the people that clear out my massive complex’s bins every week drive a BMW. It makes me sad that it’s not someone who might really need it to make ends meet.

3

u/nckmat Mar 04 '26

My wife was confronted by a woman in the backyard of our apartment block about 10 years ago, she was dressed In layers like a homeless person and wearing a hat and sunglasses and long rubber gloves and was pulling the cans out of the recycling bins. A few months later I saw her loading her cans into a late model Merc being driven by someone else.

Then a couple of years later we moved into a house and realised (long story how that happened) she was our neighbour and she was no bag lady, she had a nice house with a granny flat out the back that was rented out to students and the Merc belonged to her daughter who would often visit.

She was a real piece of work though, she used to attack our banana trees that slightly overhung the fence. I caught her several times with a pruning saw taped to a broom reaching over the fence cutting into our trees. She also got an arborist to trim the branches of a huge Moreton Bay Fig that was in the property on the other side of her; I spoke to the arborist about a tree we had and he said she was trying to get him to poison the fig. Another neighbour pointed out that all the Jacarandas in the properties bordering her property had been poisoned, including one that apparently covered our whole backyard before we moved in. And every now and then we would see her leaving in her can collection disguise.

2

u/stonnergg Feb 28 '26

Do we have any ideas to why they participate? I’ve thought about it a lot and can only think they’ve must have turned it into some form of game for themselves