Rubbish Cart Men

I just asked the people in the teachers' room "What's interesting
about being in Turkey?" First answer was the rubbish cart men. What
are the rubbish cart men? These are random guys, who walk around the
city going through the dumpsters and collecting stuff. I know, most
cities have the equivalent, but here it's a bit different. Upon
further discussion, we've determined that there are actually two
types. There's the old junk man, who collects literally anything -
pieces of wood, wire, metal, old light switches, and other random
stuff. His cart is more like a table with big wheels, and it appears
that all his stuff is for resale. He also walks down the street
shouting "ESKIJI!", somehow managing to make that word into 6 or 7
syllables. I guess at that point people would go outside with their
old stuff and give (sell?) it to him. Eskici (pronounced es-kee-jee)
means "old-stuff man" literally. In Turkish you add ci (jee) to the
end of stuff to mean "the person who sells/makes", So "dondurma" is
ice cream, and you go to a dondurmaci to buy it. Ekmek is bread and
the ekmekci sells it. Those of us here who speak English, quickly
adopt this convention and we start talking about people like the
juice-ci who sells fresh squeezed orange juice, and the telephone-ci
who will help you with a sim card for your cellphone....
Anyway the other rubbish cart men are the ones who go through the
dumpsters removing recyclables. Ok, so in most places you sort the
trash BEFORE you put it in the dumpster. Here there are guys with huge
bags, like the kind they use at sugar factories that hold a metric ton
of sugar (which we used in Israel for the equvalent amount of potting
mix), somehow attached to a dolly so it can be pushed around. I think
there are different categories, one guy who collects cardboard,
another plastic bottles, another glass. They are all over the place. I
think if the separate dumpsters concept were introduced here, a lot of
recycle-cis would be out of work!