Working for a manufacturing company has introduced me to a lot of weird ways people make money. There are people employed to take .jpg artwork and turn it into hi resolution artwork for printing. There are people who make a living teaching common sense safety information to employees of other companies. Then there are people who scavenge through companies garbage and take pallets and turn them in for cash (The Pallet People.) For those of you who do not know what a pallet is, it's what most things /boxes are packaged on for shipment via trucks, they allow for forklifts to pick up a whole stack of material for ease in transportation. A company like ours reuses some pallets (aka skids) but we bring in a lot more skids than we ship out so many we put out by the trash. Throughout the day people (mostly hispanic in this area) arrive in pickup trucks or larger panel trucks and take the skids. Some people only take the nice skids in good condition because they are worth more. Some take all skids because even the poor condition ones are worth something. They then throughout the day deliver these pallets to a pallet company who pays cash for them, refurbishes them (??? some they probably don't have to do much to) and resells them to companies. This, a small industry has stiff competition as pallet people race through the industrial parks scouting out pallets to take. Smaller vehicles tend to take only nearly perfect pallets while larger trucks take all they can. It reminds me of  that show "the deadliest catch" as the fishing boats race around the north pacific trying to get lucky and where most of the crabs are. This industry used to be male dominated but I see more and more teams of Hispanic females out collecting pallets. I suppose this "trash" industry is more profitable than collecting cans, but still is a cash business under the table.