Paper chase

Why would anyone steal old newspapers? It’s a question being asked more and more frequently in Baldwin recently.

“On Wednesday night I put out my recycling in my blue box,” David Cepler of Baldwin wrote recently in an email to the Herald. “Several hours later, when I took out the regular trash to the curb, I noticed that not only my newspapers, but both my neighbors’ papers had disappeared. I have seen people taking away metal at the curb, but never newspapers.”

Cepler phoned the sanitation district and was told he was not the first person to call with such an inquiry. Two things bothered Cepler and others in his situation: First, if people were taking his recycling, might they be looking for ways to nab his identity? And secondly, if the Sanitation Department was selling the paper to scrap dealers, shouldn’t residents of the district reap the benefits?

“The most likely explanation,” said Douglas Wiedman, secretary to the board at Sanitation District Two, “is that people are collecting the paper just like they’ve been collecting the metals from the boxes for years, to sell it. I can say that we, as a department, are not collecting the newspapers in any way other than our normal collection procedure, and we are not selling it to scrap dealers. The market for scrap fluctuates far too much for us to enter into any contract of that sort. One week we might make money for old newspapers, but the next we’d end up paying to have it taken off our hands.”

Wiedman couldn’t say why there might have been a sudden spike in newspaper hustling. “We don’t know where or why people take this stuff, but we are making an effort to identify the individuals and make them stop,” he said. “At worst, they may be sifting for identities they can sell, but even if they’re just rooting through the bins and making a mess, it costs us time and money and decreases efficiency.”

Wiedman suggested that residents who see any unauthorized newspaper removal call the sanitation district at (516) 223-3207. He also cautioned people to shred or otherwise render unusable any mail, credit card statements, bank statements or other materials that might contain confidential or identifying information.