Flood trash turns into cash for enterprising garbage pickers

MANILA, Philippines — If residents of low-lying Marikina City see the heavy rains as a curse, these barter traders admit they literally see them as a blessing.

More rains, after all, means more money for Chris Viernes, 44, since more people throw away items they think can’t be used anymore after the floods.

“I gather some of the items thrown out on the streets and sell them to junk shops or other people,” she told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in Filipino as she was rummaging through a garbage can in Provident Village, one of the hardest-hit by heavy flooding last week.

According to Viernes, her earnings always “balloon” during the rainy season, since the flooding causes more private households to dispose of their spoons, clothes, plastic containers, and cans, among others, for sanitary purposes.

Making the rounds in subdivisions after post-flooding cleanup operations in a day, for example, she said, could draw additional earning of  P150.

This is more than half what she would usually earn in a day under normal weather circumstances, she said.

“I don’t earn as much when it’s sunny. Usually, in a day, I can only get P50 to P75 since there’s less trash,” she explained.

According to Viernes, her earnings also depend on the negotiated prices of each item with her buyer.

For one kilogram of plastic containers, for example, Viernes said she would usually be paid P16. Sometimes, though, she is paid P15.

A perfectly useable T-shirt, which has been wet by the floods, she added, could be sold at P25 to thrifty individuals or “ukay-ukays.”

“Sometimes, though, I get paid higher (for the T-shirt) if it was me who washed the T-shirt and not the buyer,” she explained.

After the onslaught of tropical storm “Ondoy” in 2009, Viernes recalled how she earned at least P500 from trash she had managed to gather from streets for one entire week.

She said that at that time, there was “too much garbage” it was “impossible” to collect everything in one day.

Asked how much she expected to earn with the two big bags of plastic containers, and a small bag filled with wet clothes she had so far managed to collect from her rounds that Monday afternoon, Viernes said “around P100.”

She was quick to add that she would probably earn even more if she had transportation with which to carry the trash around.

“But I don’t have that so I will have to sell these first then go back and make my rounds again,” she said.

Unlike Viernes who was making her rounds by foot, Philip Bayaga and his wife Teresita were using a sidecar as they went around Provident Village looking for thrown items they could sell.

According to Bayaga, they rented the sidecar for P30.

This, however, he said, was already “well-compensated” since he expected to earn more than P100 with the amount of trash they had collected.