I could be mistaken but do not believe that Haddonfield enforces ordinances that prohibit trash picking. My sense is that certain "roving pickers" like the one suspected of stealing those bikes last week and others may also have contributed to the gutter thefts and other issues. Some neighboring communities do enforce such ordinances which also serves to magnify such activities here. Plus, the borough otherwise does recycle and gets money for the metals that residents discard, but they rarely get to them before the roving pickers do. Perhaps we should actively curb these activities through increased enforcement.

I look forward to the trash pickers. They can re-use what we are throwing away. Lots of perfectly good things would be going into the dumpster.They are neither intrusive nor disorderly.

I like to put my unwanted items by the curb early just hoping that someone will trash pick and reuse. And many times I've backed up my minivan to pick something myself, ether for my own use or to donate to collections at the church. Reduce, reuse, recycle! I'm all for it.

I have to agree with Nancy & Toni. While there may be some who are doing it as a way to disguise some illegal behavoir, the majority are probably actually helping reduce the cost of our trash removal, because there's less to haul away. Plus I'm all for the reduce, reuse, recycle aspect. I do it myself on both sides sometimes, placing items out early hoping that someone else can reuse it or picking up stuff, like brick to reuse in my garden plot or a beautiful mirrored picture that just wasn't the previous owner's taste any longer.

The main thing is, if people would just learn to lock up their houses and bikes, a lot of this theft wouldn't be happening. The thieves would move on to an easier target.

I agree with many of the comments above and do the same thing of putting things out in the open so that can be reused by others. But having a passerby or neighbor make use of something versus the professional pickers who are roving around looking for scrap and items of value is something that at least needs to be looked at. I've heard plenty of examples over the years of things disappearing that were not trash and were not all that close to the curb. Expensive strollers, bikes, etc. The theft of hard to replace materials attached to people's homes has been a real problem as well, all in the name of scrap value. Once it is in their trucks, it is VERY hard to prove anything. Scrappers are taking items that do have value to the Borough and otherwise would help to reduce our waste costs if they were not breaking our ordinances by taking them. Perhaps there is a balance between reuse and limited innocent trash picking and crime reduction by cracking down on roving trucks loaded up with what at best represents money out of our own waste removal budgets, and at worst could represent some ill gotten stolen materials.

All above is well a good but is anyone else shocked and alarmed at this almost weekly list of burglaries and thefts in our town?

Is the word out that we are easy pickings or is something else??

Tom

Im a trash picker myself. I cannot tell you how many awesome items I have found. It is harmless. If you are going to restrict things like this, then you may as well not have sidewalks either, because ANYONE with the wrong intemtions that are passerbys can create havoc. Why not pay attention to those few people that supposedly are not obeying the rules? UGH. More restrictions is just what we DONT need. Pretty soon, we will all have to stay in our homes for fear of breaking some ridiculous rule.