In Romania these scavengers are often snubbed as �drunkards�, �gypsy-vomit� or the common slur �black crows�, yet no one seems to take much notice to the environmental impact they single handedly accomplish and which comes shockingly clear by the day�s end with the setting sun glistening off the heaps of plastics and metals salvaged by the Gypsies.
National Recycling programs in newly appointed EU states Romania and Bulgaria are still in their infancy with Romania landing at the very bottom of European Union with a low 15% recyclable rate. In the villages where garbage pick-up is sporadic or some cases non-existent, the waste problem is often dealt with by burning or carelessly dumped it straight into the passing stream. In cities like the capital Bucharest, street corner depositories compete with an undeveloped recycling culture and apartment dwellers undiscriminating rubbish shoots. As a result, much of the plastics and metals lining the supermarket aisles finds its way into the landfills of which much is later filtered out by the Gypsies
After the sudden collapse of communism and subsequent shutting down of the state owned factories, many out-of-work Gypsies fell back on the scavenging instincts of their ancestors. At the Gypsy shantytown at Patta Ratt in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, the team of Lotinna Lutzi and her nineteen year old step-daughter average about 600 pounds of recyclable waste every three days, slim pickings in comparison to other teams that includes husband, wives, elderly in-laws and vast network of children.
Lotina was six years old when she came to the shantytown at the heel of her widowed mother. By ten she was working the landfill. Within a few years her mother left to join her father. Life expectancy for Gypsies falls generally ten to fifteen years below the majority � and which is considerably lower than that at places like Patta Ratt; those that do live, don�t live well.
An effort by local authorities in the Eastern Romanian city of Piatra Neamt to force the smaller settlement of scavengers into other professions was carried out by suddenly forbidding their entry into the bountiful dumpsite, yet without taking into account that the majority of the scavengers are illiterate and without work skills. Mitica Munteanu, who had been working the Piatra Neamt dumpsite since he was ten, has been forced to take his horse and wagon through the streets, rummaging through trash bins and dumpsters where his daily intake is a quarter of what it had been at the resourceful dump.
�On a good day we take in about 20 pounds,� says his wife Crina from the wagon. �It brings us about five dollars. It�s not going to be enough to feed three mouths,� she adds, her eyes pointing down to a swollen belly. �I don�t know what we will do.�
While it is the city Gypsies that has mostly turned to scavenging the plentiful dumps, the countryside isn�t without its natural environmentalist. These Gypsies, of which many still heat their homes and cook their food from dead branches gathered off the forest floor, harvest the wilderness for mushrooms, forest greens, fruits and nuts that they sell by the roadside. The Rudari tribe, the woodworkers, still use what gifts Mother Nature offers, a common kitchen knife and an axe in the making of baskets, brooms, and wooden spoons as their ancestors had done hundreds of years ago.