Liz Lee peers into a recycling bin, laughs and slams the lid shut.
The 79-year-old has struck gold: the bin is three-quarters full of empty cans, each representing a 10 cent refund at recycling collection points. She reopens the bin and reaches in, passing each can to her friend, Julie Griffin, 63.
The retirees spend around 20 hours a week diving into recycling bins around Sydney’s eastern suburbs, collecting every eligible can, carton and plastic and glass bottle they can find for New South Wales’ Return and Earn scheme.
With bags looped over her forearms, Griffin sorts as they go. They both wear gloves and occasionally masks: despite the morning’s heat, there haven’t been any maggots or putrid chicken carcasses to contend with – so far.
They’ll earn $40.10 from about three hours’ work today, boosted by that single bin load, while last week, they made $80 in one morning alone.
She’s pleased about those results, but Lee says she did not expect to spend her retirement hunting through strangers’ rubbish as a means to supplement her pension.
“I like it, I enjoy it,” she says, “but never in a million years did I think I’d be doing this.”
Originally from northern England, Lee has been living in Sydney since 1969. She lost her commercial kitchen job during Covid lockdowns and, not wanting to rely on food banks, says collecting drinks containers, known as “hunting”, has become a lifeline.
By 11am, Griffin and Lee will have redeemed the containers, spent the money on a food shop and topped up Lee’s car with the remaining $10.
“It keeps me active, it pays for my dog’s food – and my food – and my petrol. As a pensioner, you can’t afford petrol,” she says.
A few streets away, Ricky – who asked for her surname not to be used – can be heard before she’s seen: the clink of bottles precedes the rattle of her half-full shopping trolley as she works her away along a leafy Bondi road.
The 65-year-old, originally from Switzerland, is two hours in and two bulging bags hang from the trolley, its cage filled with a jumble of plastic bottles.
She also lost her job during Covid lockdowns and needed something to keep her busy and mobile. What started as a hobby with her friend Lee became a three-day-a-week job, with every second Tuesday – prime foraging time before the yellow bin collection – her busiest shift.
She went from a rudimentary set-up of a couple of bags and gloves to using a supermarket trolley and a double layer of gloves.
“In the beginning, you feel sort of ashamed, you think, ‘What if someone who knows me sees?’ Then you get to the point of ‘Who cares?’”
At worst, she’s encountered razor-like broken window panes, otherwise, a stomach-turning jumble of rotting food and dirty containers is not unusual, she says.
“Every yellow lid is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you get in there,” she says. “Sometimes, you get a banana, sometimes you hit the jackpot.”
While the flow is neither consistent nor predictable, it’s rewarding – and addictive, she says – work for the diligent: Ricky makes around $150 a week, paid directly into her bank account, or via vouchers.
The former baker and cafe owner has attempted to find a part-time job but says she continuously encountered ageism, and her hunting has become more than a way to stay fit.
“You don’t get rich from it,” she says, “but I can live from it during the week.”
Lee, Griffin and Ricky are part of what they say is a growing cohort of elderly people – often women – who are collecting bottles and cans in an attempt to stave off the bite of low incomes converging with rising costs of living.
“There’s a lot of 50-, 60-, 70-year-olds, definitely,” says Lee. “The three biggest hunters I know are in their 70s. They’re not walking fast but they’re productive.”
Since it began in 2017, the Return and Earn scheme has delivered more than $1.3bn in refunds to people in NSW. Some 10.3m containers were returned on 23 December alone – a new record – with two out of three eligible containers sold in NSW now redeemed.
The containers are valued by recyclers because they are separated, cleaned and easier to recycle into a new container or other product.
The scheme, which does not condone what it calls fossicking, has no data around the number of active hunters, but data compiled by Verian show the highest participation rate at collection points by age group to be 18- to 24-year-olds. About 66% of people over the age of 65 have used the scheme.
Lee’s home bins are off-limits (an elderly man has claimed the turf) so she drives from her social housing in Matraville to spots around Malabar, Clovelly, Rose Bay and Bondi where friends have left her bags-full on porches and outside front doors.
She knows where the bottled-water drinkers and the Jack Daniels premix fans live. And, she has learned when unit block caretakers move bins on to kerbsides before collections.
“It’s getting more fierce,” she says of the competition. “It’s so hard. You’re on the road at a quarter past six and already you see the hunters.”
Ricky’s main rivals are a duo who each start from one end of the same street, moving inwards. They used to give her the cold shoulder, Ricky says, but they now wave to one another.
“Two other men used to work the same patch. They were cleaning up everything in the area. They were fast,” she says. “Then more and more came.”
She knows of hunters who work the bins along Bondi beach at night to avoid both competitors and the public. At the drop-off point in Kings Cross, things are more cooperative, she says.
She says it takes an hour for her to feed a carload into the machines, container by container, but familiar faces help one another out.
Despite working quickly, quietly and cleanly, all three have encountered threats of calls to the police from residents. On kerbsides, the contents of bins are generally seen as fair game, although it depends on the council, while accessing bins on private property counts as trespassing.
“I don’t go back there, because I know she’s right,” Ricky says of one angry resident.
Lee is careful to avoid hunting around her neighbourhood for a different reason.
“I don’t want [my neighbours] to see me go through the bins. I’m embarrassed,” she says. She and her late husband once owned five properties between them and dreamed of moving to Queensland in their retirement.
“He would turn over in his grave if he saw me going through the bins. He’d think it is below me,” she says. “But, that’s life. That’s the way things are.”
