IN ATHENS, SCAVENGING FROM BINS HAS BECOME A WAY TO SURVIVE

Greek debt crisis: In Athens, scavenging from bins has become a way to survive

As the country prepares to vote on continuing austerity on Sunday, in the streets of Athens some people have already resorted to searching the rubbish bins for food to eat and scrap metal to sell

By Colin Freeman, and Alastair Good, Athens


8:43PM BST 30 Jun 2015

Piled high with rubbish congealing in the summer heat, municipal dustbin R21 on Athens' Sofokleous Street does not look or smell like a treasure trove.
But for Greece's growing army of dustbin scavengers, its deposits of rubbish from nearby stores and grocery shops make it a regular point of call.
"Sometimes I'll find scrap metal that I can sell, although if I see something that looks reasonably safe to eat, I'll take it," said Nikos Polonos, 55, as he sifted through R21's contents on Tuesday morning. "Other times you might find paper, cans, and bottles that you can get money for if you take them back to the shops for recycling."
One reason for R21's popularity is because it is just down the road from a church soup kitchen, where the drug-addicted, the poor and homeless queue up for meals three times daily.

But many of those who now forage in such dustbins each day are simply ordinary working people - or were, at least, until Greece's economic meltdown shot unemployment up to 25 per cent.
Mr Polonos, a quietly spoken man of 55, is typical of the new class of respectably destitute. He lost his job as a construction worker three years ago, when Greece's building boom dried up, and in the current climate, cannot see himself finding paid work in the foreseeable future.
Yet he dresses as smartly as he can in second-hand trousers and shirt, and does not see himself as any kind of vagrant.
"I don't want to ever look like him," he said, gesturing to a tousle-haired drug addict slumped in a doorway near the soup kitchen. "I never believed I would end up like this, but as long as Greece is in this terrible situation, my construction skills are not in demand. A lot of my friends are doing what I do now, and some people I know are even worse off. They have turned to drugs and have no hope at all."
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The exact numbers of people who now scrape a living by rummaging through Athens' bins is hard to estimate, since many only operate at night when their friends and neighbours will not see them. But according to Panos Karamanlikis, a volunteer at the soup kitchen, the numbers have increased by two or three times since 2011 alone.

"A lot of them are normal people from normal homes," said Mr Karamanlikis, who lost his job himself back in 2006 when the insurance company he worked for shed 60 per cent of its work force. "They will go out and look for cigarette stubs on the streets, tin cans to recycle, anything."
Stephen Graham, an anti-austerity campaigner from England who has spent the last three months travelling through Greece to study its economic problems, said that well-to-do scavengers were a common sight in the Athens suburb where he lived.
"These are people who still have trappings of their old way of life, who still have clothes for work and smartphone contracts they can’t get out of," he said. "They go to different neighbourhoods to scavenge so that people they know don’t see them. Seeing them is something I'll never forget."
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Many of the new underclass bring the same disciplined routine to scraping a living as they did to the world of work. Mr Polonos, who lives alone, spends eight hours a day scouring the streets, and is now well-versed in the best places to hunt and in the prices of Athens' skid-row economy. A bundle of discarded copper wire will earn him 50 cents (35p) a kilo from a scrap merchant, for example, while 70 aluminium cans can fetch €1.5.
"On an average day I can maybe make five or ten euros," he said.
Bread can be often found dumped at dustbins near supermarkets and bakeries, he added, although he said he only ate food that had been left deliberately by well-wishers.
Many others, however, eat whatever they can, despite the health risks. Outside her jewellery store near Syntagma Square, Michaela Evag, 55, said she regularly saw an elderly woman looking through the dustbin for food for her family. "I gave her some money and told her not to eat the food in the bins as it might have been poisoned by rats," she said. "She told me not to worry, as she always cleaned it in vinegar once she took it home."
Indeed, for Mr Polonos, one problem these days is the sheer competition from other bin scavengers. "I would say someone like me probably rummages in this particular bin every 15 minutes," he said, as he wandered off empty-handed from R21. "It can be quite hard to find anything."
Still, it had not been a bad morning's work. Inside his battered red hold-all was a large bundle of copper wire and three half-litre bottles of Achala Clauss Domestica, a very cheap Greek wine that someone else had clearly deemed undrinkable. "I'll sell the copper and drink the wine," he smiled. "You don't find gold or diamonds in these bins, but I'm happy with that for today."