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Every day in Seoul’s trendy upscale shopping district of Myeong-dong, fortunes are made from the sale of luxury goods and accessories to fashion-forward young men and women.

Though for some who work here, the fortunes they seek could be called anything but, and made not from the sale of expensive wares but from the boxes they arrive in. For some of South Korea’s poor and elderly, cardboard is big business.

“It took me two hours to gather these boxes,” said Lee Je-ho, 57, eyeing the flattened cardboard bulging under strained bungee cords tied to his metal cart. “That’s about 6,000 won (CDN$ 6.28).”

Amid the hurried shoppers, the fashionista callers yelling out sales from the stoops of their store fronts, and the street vendors hawking elaborate cellphone cases, Lee bores his way through the massed crowds. Though in great discord with South Korea’s most expensive commercial real estate, Lee goes unnoticed, for the sighting of an old man pushing a large cart loaded down with cardboard is more than common in this country.

Lee is one of South Korea’s estimated 1.4 million pyeji jumneun saram — “refuse pickers,” translated from Korean — who walk the country’s streets in all weather and at all hours searching through garbage for reusable material like iron and steel, but mainly cardboard, and sell what they find for pennies a kilo to private junk depots.

“They make on average 10,000 won a day,” said Kim Young-gwang, secretary general of the Resource Recycling Association, an organization founded under the Ministry of Environment by private small-sized Seoul junk depots in October 2011.

Most refuse pickers are elderly and destitute, he said. They work 12 hours a day starting at 4 a.m. so as to collect the discarded boxes “before somebody else does.”

Due to limitations of disability and age most are only able to make between 100,000 and 150,000 won a month, Kim Young-gwang said.

“For economic development, Korea has only looked forward and has never looked back,” Kim Young-gwang said. “So the elderly who pick up boxes have been ignored.”

The first refuse pickers, originally called Neongma-jui or “rag pickers,” according to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, appeared during the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula (1910-45). Considered vagrants, they were shunned by society and lived near train stations and under bridges collecting and selling any discarded material they could find.

Then with the breakout of the Korean War (1950-53) droves turned to the collecting of recyclables out of necessity, and their numbers have increased ever since, Kim Young-gwang said.

“I think [the refuse pickers] are living their second lives,” he said. “In one sense, they were once failures in life. Most of them once failed at something, like their own business.”

This is how Lee became a refuse picker. Three years ago he owned a children’s clothing factory that went out of business following a large fire that claimed the lives of some of Lee’s employees. Lee said he compensated the families for their loss, which caused him to go bankrupt.

“After that, I had nothing and I had to work but I was old and there was no company that would hire me. So I started picking up boxes. I am doing this because I don’t want to die,” Lee said.

When asked about his income, Lee said he makes between 50,000 to 60,000 won a day, sometimes as much as 100,000 won “because I have some shops where the owners give me boxes.”

“It’s true,” said Kim Geun-seop, 58, as he walked the back alleys of Myeong-dong holding two cardboard boxes in his left hand. “If you have shops that give you boxes you can make 50,000 won a day. I don’t have a shop, so I just wait and pick up boxes that don’t belong to anyone.”

Kim Geun-seop, who became a refuse picker five years ago because of a disabled right hand, said when he “works hard” he can make 15,000 won in a day, but it’s difficult.

Some store owners, he said, make deals with the refuse pickers to give them boxes in exchange for cleaning their shops. But most will not allow him to enter their stores because Kim Geun-seop — unwashed, unshaven, and unkempt — is like many of the 50,000 refuse pickers in Seoul: he is homeless.

“They’re worried that we’ll steal from their shops so they don’t let us in,” Kim Geun-seop said, adding that it had been over a month since he had last showered.

Due to “Recycling Stops,” a Seoul government plan by Kim Ju-hyun that was approved by the Seoul City government in May of last year, the situation for refuse pickers is expected to become even more difficult.

With the aim to improve the profitability of the city’s waste disposal system, the government will hire a maximum of 13,000 seniors citizens at 500,000 won a month to watch over and collect reusable material from garbage dropoff locations throughout Seoul. In other words, the Seoul government will collect the recyclable material and sell it directly to private companies, effectively cutting out the junk depots and roughly four-fifths of the city’s refuse pickers.

Kim Young-gwang of the Resource Recycling Association characterized the ordinance as a move to create jobs and curb the underground economy, both goals of President Park Geun-hye, who is looking to increase the employment rate and shore up funds to finance the expensive campaign promises she made during the 2012 presidential election campaign such as providing free kindergarten education to children under five years of age and a monthly basic pension for all elderly citizens.

In late December of last year, however, the plight of the refuse pickers gained some attention with the passing of an ordinance that was penned as an amendment to the “Recycling Stops” plan.

The ordinance refers to them for the first time officially as “refuse pickers” instead of generally as members of the “vulnerable class,” which could give them the recognition necessary to mobilize as a special interest group that has distinct and specific needs which are not necessarily shared by other poor communities.

The main objective of the ordinance, however, is to provide roughly 2,500 of those refuse pickers to be hired by the Seoul government with safety equipment, such as reflective vests and lights and free health checkups.

Though a step in the right direction, Kim Young-gwang thinks more needs to be done.

“They would provide people whose addresses are registered in Seoul, over 65 years of age or who have over a level 5 disabled registration with these services. Actually, there is nothing we can do for (Kim Geun-seop) under this law right now,” he said.

This industry of “urban mining” supports the bankrupt, the poor, and the elderly, said Jeong Jae-an, policy chairman for the Resource Recycling Association, and this plan is threatening their livelihood.

“We are in danger because of the Recycling Stops,” he said, adding that his greatest worry is that this plan might “destroy” this underground economy that so many underprivileged people depend on and the government has no plan to help the refuse pickers who will then be out of work.

“This policy is killing the private recycling industry,” he said.

In a telephone interview, a refuse picker, who requested to be called only by his surname Hong, said that he first heard of the plan three years ago and that the situation he and other refuse pickers now face is dire.

“I can’t live like this. We can’t live like this,” Hong said.

The profession is mainly populated by the old, Hong said, because they are unfit for other manual labour jobs. And this plan will prevent him from making a living because the refuse pickers that will be hired will effectively guard over their designated areas and stop others from collecting the recyclables. If he is caught taking garbage from a designated area, he fears he will be fined.

Though the Seoul government has said that no fines will be handed out for taking garbage from the allotted “Recycling Stops,” many refuse pickers remain highly skeptical of the government as they feel it has a history of going back on its word.

“How can we live like this?” Hong said, “We live a poverty-stricken life. There is nothing but poverty. There are some old people who have frozen to death during the winter … In a sense, it is murder.”

Translations, interpretations, and additional research by Lim Jin Young and Lim Hyun Jeong.