Recycling or Redecorating

Nowadays there is a profession that is hitting the market. This group of money earners is known as scrap mongers. What do they do - collect scraps and earning good money too.

For the past three years the most sought after scrap is metal - zinc, iron, aluminium, with copper being the most popular as it fetches good returns. This group of money earners are not just people who are pressured under the need of having a daily income but they are joined by those with steady paycheck earners who moonlight for the extra ringgit. Come to think of it, this is a good income in the present economic slow down, hard work no doubt but a lucrative one.

Caught on candid camera was a man with his wheel burrow pushing his findings for the afternoon to a nearby junk operator. Whilst some do collect scraps thrown out by some indiscriminate house owners at the grass verge outside their house without a sense of guilt of littering, the second photography tells a different story.

One cannot help but note that what the diligent scrap monger is carting is not something likely to be thrown away by its owner! It is more likely to be an item that has been illegally taken. Come to think it might be the missing gate of a friend who came home one day from work to find something strange. Still fazed from the long traffic bumper to bumper crawling along the highway he drove straight into his car porch. It took him a while to realise that he has no gate to close - they had simply vamoosed.

From a survey made, other common findings of house owners are missing man holes covers from their driveway, tap heads from pipe stand in their garden, and any metal items e.g. garden scissors, spades in fact any thing metal that may fetch a ringgit or two, including live-wires. A livid housewife is still fuming that her set of pots and pans left to dry outside her home were conveniently being whisked away too.

Putting inconvenience aside, this is also a concern of the safety of family members i.e. the elderly and the young who may become victims when confronting these scrap mongers. Incidence of broad daylight of theft metal and sidelined with robbery is escalating. The local authorities or perhaps an agency be set up to monitor the ongoing problem and come up with some solution - fast.

So true for the idiom that "one man's meat being the other man's poison".