(Ricoh GX200)
If you've ever visited Hong Kong, it is likely that you came across old folks piling up discarded cardboards in the street. Why, you may ask.
Hong Kong put in place a mandatory pension scheme for the population for just around a decade. Although the British administrators came from a welfare country, they didn’t really bring in their suitcases the same welfare regime to the oriental world. When the Brits were at the helm here, only the society’s most underprivileged were given a bare minimum of social welfare protection. The British colonial rule was widely known to be move along the line of treating Hong Kong "a borrowed place on borrowed time". If there was any serious thought about welfare, it had to be only for the benefit of the administrators and their homeland in the occident world.
So we have lots of old people who are living beyond their means after retirement. Without any pension protection, they go out in the street and find a intuitive way to make a meager income by selling recyclable waste to waste recyclers. But unscrupulous recyclers are not uncommon in their experience because more often than not the scales for measuring the weights (and therefore value) of the waste they collected have been found tampered. These seniors are old but not stupid. As a counter-measure and to do justice to their own hard work, they will usually dampen the cardboards to make it weigh heavier before bringing to the recyclers.
Comments