Using the law to shut down competition, …

…and thereby creating a loverly black market.

Heh.

“Cardboard poaching,” as it’s become known, is a multimillion-dollar cancer growing in the diseased corpus of recycling crime. Though the media have lately zeroed in on scrap-metals theft and restaurant-grease rustling, the stealing of cardboard still hovers below most people’s awareness level. That might change soon as the bandits become even more brazen and as recyclers bear down on the papery perps who propagate this unusual black market.
…
The way it’s supposed to work is that approximately 150,000 commercial establishments in New York contract with waste-removal companies* who are licensed with the Business Integrity Commission, which among other duties is responsible for helping fight corruption in the city’s garbage-management trade after the Mafia’s intrusion in the 1990s. These authorized haulers schedule pick-up times with the businesses and whisk the waste away in professional-looking trucks.

So who, precisely, is being stolen from here? Retailers end their business days up to their asses in empty cardboard boxes. They can’t burn them, it costs serious money to keep dumpsters available, plus the city pushes them to recycle the cardboard and not just throw it away. So they bale up the cardboard and shove it into the alley. They don’t really give a damn where it goes, as long as it goes.

Except the city makes good money licensing the companies that pick up recyclables, and those companies, which can only get the licenses through good old-fashioned graft and corruption, same as the taxi companies, have made serious investments in bribes and license fees before they ever pick up a box. They want something back for all that graft they were forced to pay. Sure, they get paid by the retailers, who are forced to pay for the “service” by the city. But if the companies picking up the trash don’t get the trash, they lose out on a good deal of income.

So freelance recycling becomes “theft.” All that money paid out to the city bureaucrats raises the price of the commodity extensively ($100 a ton???) so naturally the freelancers come out in droves.

This is how lawmakers create crime. 😛