They are in high demand among the street people / They bring them profits of hundreds of lei per day / “They know the rules very well. Look only for packages with “dot””

For several weeks, on the streets of Oradea, there are more and more people carrying bags with PETs. They are usually street people or of Roma ethnicity, who rummage in bins or street baskets for PETs, cans or bottles for which they can get money from shops, reports The Bihorean.

“They know the rules very well. They only look for the packages with the “dot”, that is, the SGR signs, they know that they must also have the lid, and if necessary, they wash them”, says an employee of the RER Vest sanitation company, who, working to clean the city’s streets, noticed increasing the phenomenon in the last month.

Most of the time, the “collectors” have large bags with them, in which they keep each package “safely”. Then, they take the bags to the recycling centers set up by the big stores, where they exchange the received vouchers for money. Others prefer neighborhood stores that return the cash guarantee without any intermediate ticket

Even those involved testify how lucrative the business is. A woman who daily checks the street bins in the center of Oradea collects all the bottles thrown by passers-by, most of them with a volume of 0.5 liters. “There was a time when I made 650 lei from the bottles,” she is proud of the most profitable day, since she has her new “job”. A simple mathematical calculation shows that the woman returned 1,300 packages to the store, collected, of course, in 2-3 days.

In the cooler days, the business is not as profitable, but the woman knows that summer is near, the people of Oradea and tourists will drink more and more liquids when they walk outside, so she will have more and more chances to make money from nothing .