Bottle collectors do battle in Helsinki parks

Foreigners now dominating in the search for empties in "the big league"

print this

By Tommi Melajoki and Anna Kopteff
     
      “The Sinebrychoff Park; it’s the NHL or the European Champions League of empties collectors: the other parks aren’t much more than the farm-team leagues”, is the analysis offered by Jasu Merikari, loafing in the sunshine as the collectors leap into action in pursuit of returnable empty bottles on Thursday.
     
When the sun comes out, the Sinebrychoff Park, off Helsinki’s Bulevardi, becomes a picnic spot for hundreds of people.
      Those who hang out in the park catching a few rays naturally leave behind them a good deal of empty bottles and cans that can be taken back to stores and exchanged for hard cash.
      Collecting these deposit beer bottles and drinks cans has morphed from being the pursuit of casuals into an almost professional exercise. A new cadre, largely made up of foreign collectors, has come into the market to stay.
     
At the same time, the newcomers in the business have thrown down a challenge to the predominantly pension-aged bottle gatherers, many of whom have been in the trade for years.
      Francis Sam from Gambia has been going to the Sinebrychoff Park to collect bottles for the past three weeks or so.
      His take on things is that it really isn’t worth going to the capital’s other parks, because this one has quite the most people and the best trade.
     
Nevertheless, his haul on Wednesday after an hour of collecting doesn’t seem likely to set any records.
      “Hmm. About a euro fifty cents”, he says after a cursory look into his bag.
      At the going rate of EUR 0.10 for a standard 33cl beer bottle, EUR 0.15 for cans, and as much as EUR 0.40 for the large one-litre and 1.5-litre soft drinks bottles, Francis has certainly had better days than this.
      He is one of the regulars on this particular beat. “There are Ghanaians here, and Nigerians, and Romanians, too”, he says.
      The collectors do not form one happy group, all pooling their bottles and cans into the same common pot.
      This is a battleground for customers, then?
      “It’s just friendly banter, really. Nobody is fighting over empty bottles around here”, laughs Sam.
     
He shows up in the Sinebrychoff Park evening after evening.
      His “working day” here starts at around 20:00.
      During the day he says he is out looking for work. He uses the money he makes from taking back the deposit-bottles and cans to buy food.
      After the shops are closed, the bags of bottles are generally taken home for safe keeping.
      Some collectors can alternatively look for a secret spot to stash them in the bushes, but Sam says that the “under lock and key” approach is the smarter way to go.
      “Once I stashed some bottles overnight in a bush, and when I went back the next morning, someone had liberated them.”
     
On weekend evenings the pickings are richer but the competition is really fierce.
      “One Saturday I counted 32 collectors out there”, says Francis Sam.
      The pace at which the bottles vanish is jaw-dropping.
      The park adheres to a sort of unofficial “rule of ten seconds”: a bottle finished and discarded will be in someone’s bag in under 10 seconds, always assuming it IS a bottle for which the collector can get a recycling return.
      There are certain restrictions: bottles originally bought from the Lidl discount stores often have to be taken back to where they came from, and Alko bottles - wines and the harder stuff - will not be accepted by supermarkets unless the collection-point is shared with an Alko outlet.
     
The efficiency of the market also means the law of the strongest and fittest is in play.
      The slow and the lame are easily left behind in the rush. This is bad news for the earlier generation of collectors, who often came from the upper age-groups.
     
Alppipuisto in the district of Alppila is quieter than normal on the same Wedensday evening. There are only two collectors in evidence, and one of them is an elderly woman who lives in the neighbourhood.
      She reports that in the same fashion as the Sinebrychoff Park to the south, there is competition here for empties and the money to be made from them.
      “There are usually three or four immigrants here who leave everyone else in their wake", the woman says with more than a trace of annoyance.
      According to this veteran empties-comber, some of the most determined collectors will even swipe half-drunk bottles from the hands of the picnickers in the park.
     
"Once during some event or other I saw as they collected eight large sacks full of bottles. One big sack like that is worth about 50 euros."
      Whoa. You mean a EUR 400 haul in a single day? Is this really possible?
      It may be. A nearby Alepa supermarket reports that the store gets between EUR 300 and EUR 400 worth of empty bottles and cans returned each day, so the figure could be true.
     
Professional bottle-collecting has been duly noted in the stores close by the major hunting-grounds.
      The nearest Alepa to the Sinebrychoff Park has for instance been forced to turn away people bringing in large consignments, owing to the lack of space on the premises.
      The returns recorded in the close-by S-Market suggest that the collectors have shifted over there.
      The supermarket says it has an average of 6,000 euros worth of returnables coming in each week, with the peaks occurring on summer weekends.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.8.2009

More on this subject:
 As much as 90% of returnable cans come back
 Have you got the bottle for it?

TOMMI MELAJOKI AND ANNA KOPTEFF / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.melajoki@hs.fi