Californians are pretty good about thinking twice before throwing things away—we divert more than 60 percent of our waste away from landfills. But what about that remaining 40 percent?
Bassam Almgaleh and Pascal Zeino have picked up a lot of trash from the streets of Oakland. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the two Public Works Department employees drove their garbage truck to more than a dozen sites in the city in response to residents' complaints about illegally dumped items: discarded furniture, bags filled with rotten food, the remains of an abandoned homeless encampment.
