Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The Black Market and College Furniture

College kids have used stolen milk crates for decades as building blocks of coffee tables and dorm room shelves. Now, people are cashing in by swiping thousands of the containers from loading docks and selling them to shady recyclers. The containers are chopped and shipped to China to be made into a variety of products. This represents an estimated $80 million in losses from the thefts. Dairies across the country are moving to stop the plastic pilfering. In California, companies are even hiring private detectives and staging sting operations.

"We saw them disappearing into this black hole," said Rachel Kaldor, executive director of the Dairy Institute, a trade group in Sacramento. "We just don't know who's stealing these crates off the loading docks."

In the past two years, the high-density plastic has joined a list of materials that are being stolen and sold via a thriving underground recycling network. Thieves target copper, aluminum bleachers, beer kegs, even cemetery vases and nameplates.

It took a while for dairies to determine what was happening to their crates.
"If it were just college kids taking them, the dormitories would be overflowing with milk cases," said Stephen Schaffer, general manager of Alta Dena Dairy near Los Angeles. The crates are made of petroleum-based plastic that has increased in value along with gasoline prices. The material now sells for 22 cents a pound, compared to 7 cents a pound in 2005, said Patty Moore, a recycling consultant in Sonoma, Calif. Consumers can spend as much as $10 for an "authentic" dairy crate at retailers such as the Container Store. Dairies pay about $4 when they buy in bulk.
Last year, the industry lost about 20 million crates to thieves. California, the nation's largest dairy state, has taken the lead in the fight against plastic poachers. Wood hopes the busts encourage college students and homeowners to voluntarily return any stolen milk crates they might be using. Alta Dena's has even set up a "milk crate abuse" hotline at (800) 457-6688 for people to surrender the containers, no questions asked. It shows that illegal undocumented black markets really do exist. There can be a market for anything. Most often, we just think of black markets as drug selling murder rings. Well, milk crates count also.

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