ONE man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. No one in Buff Bay, Portland, knows this perhaps better than Neville Webb who operates a collection centre for recyclables at his home in Woodstock.

He has made a thriving business out of buying plastic bottles, tins and batteries from scavengers who rummage the nearby Doctor’s Wood disposal site and ferret out the items which are later bagged and transported to a recycling company Kingston where the cans are compressed into loom, the plastic into polyester fibre, and the lead removed from the batteries.

Webb told the Jamaica Observer North East that he pays his customers — some of whom travel from as far as the neighbouring parish of St Mary — $100 for a large garbage bag of bottles and $70 if he has to provide the bag. The cans are bought for $10 per pound with the minimum amount being 25 pounds.

“You know how much people this provide income for in east Portland?” Webb quipped as he took the Observer North East team on a quick tour of his yard which was piled high with the recyclable items.

He added: “The people who come to sell me get them money right away fi go provide fi dem family or do whatever dem want.”

Webb said some neighbouring schools also collect bottles and sell to him when it gets to a certain amount. Once he accumulates enough stock, Webb said the Kingston company sends a truck to pick it up.

His recycling business doesn’t only provide an income to those seeking quick cash. It also offers employment to three women who package the waste for transportation. In spite of that, however, Webb yearns for the day when the scrap metal trade will resume, as this was the most profitable side of his business.

The Portlander, who operated a scrap metal business for more than 20 years, still has thousands of dollars worth of metal stockpiled at his home. He bought them prior to the ban the previous Administration imposed on the trade as a result of wide-scale theft of household and commercial metal which often ended up on the market.

“It hit me bad, bad when me hear that the trade was to close, but ah still keeping dem in the hope they will reopen the trade someday so me can recover mi money,” he said.

Webb said that those who sold metals to him were not the only ones affected by the ban, but that the truck operator who was usually paid $25,000 per load to transport the metal to exporters in Kingston has also been put out of work. The scrap metal, he said, is usually sold to exporters for between $15,000 and $20,000 a tonne.

He insisted that he only bought scrap metal and not metals which had been stolen.

“When the people come with the things I always check to see if it is legal,” he said.

A visit to the disposal site revealed that not many scavengers were finding it profitable anymore since the closure of the trade. A man, who identified himself only as Sean, was seen rummaging for glass bottles which he said would fetch him way more than the plastic bottles or tins.

“It hard to carry ah big bag a plastic bottle from down here so me no badda wid it,” he said.

He explained, too, that it also takes a longer time to collect a garbage bag of plastic bottles only to receive $100 for it.

“Me get more fi di (glass) bottles so me stick to this,” he said.

What would pay even more, however, according to the scavenger, are metals.

“It easier fi look the scrap metal and dem pay more fi it so we want it fi come back,” he said.