These guys provide the service for free and faster than the "legitimate" one.
They didn't threaten anyone. They just came, picked up the trash, and left.
The only angry people are the "legitimate" waste collectors who pay kickbacks to politicians to keep this monopoly alive.
It seems like the market is working as designed and the scavengers are successfully competing since they are able to provide the same service more efficiently than the current company.
This being said those contracts ensure some legal obligations for the service provider. Everything from providing the recycling bins, to providing service to everyone equally, to providing service consistently. And the recyclables are usually picked up by the same company pickling up the garbage. With that income gone they'd just jack up the prices for the garbage, which I assure you won't be picked up by any scavenger.
You don't want your garbage or recyclables to stay on the street corner for days because the scavengers don't provide any bins, there's no money in garbage pickup, and your recyclables are too small game for them to go out of their way to pick them up. As a city you also don't want to realize one day that they just moved on to even more profitable business elsewhere while heaps of trash are popping up around town.
As with anything, if it's important you want more than just best effort by someone who's anyway just piggy backing on someone else's groundwork.
If society in the aggregate is spending twice as much (or whatever) fuel to get the recyclables to the recyclers, a few hours less time spent waiting in the bin is not some kind of win.
> The only angry people are the "legitimate" waste collectors who pay kickbacks to politicians to keep this monopoly alive.
Some percentage of the people who don't want randos going through their bins are certainly angry.
Which clearly didn’t work so they did a sting operation. Apparently humans are harder to defeat than raccoons.
So in other words The City of Madrid has a recycling business and they are unhappy with the competition.
Of course where the cardboard ends up is probably not an issue here, as we are talking about recycling. But there are still a ton of ways an organization operating outside official contracts and regulations can cut corners to be "more efficient" than the official contractors are, and they can cut those corners in ways that have a larger negative impact on society than the upside of the trash being out of the street faster.
You can do a very minor crime and be charged for money laundering (which is a serious offense).
In the criminal context Money laundering doesn’t have a vague definition. It is a crime with very specific definitions codified in statutes, each having their own elements and controlling case law from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
For example, at the US Federal level there are 4 very specific types of unlawful money laundering (promotional, concealment, structuring and tax evasion).
And at least at the Federal Level the companion statute prohibits depositing or spending more than $10,000 from the predicated offense.
(1) Money laundering means:
1) the concealment or disguise of the true nature, source, location, disposition, movement, right of ownership or other rights related to property derived from criminal activity or property obtained instead of such property;
or
2) the conversion, transfer, acquisition, possession or use of property derived from criminal activity or property obtained instead of such property for the purpose of concealing or disguising the illicit origin of the property or of assisting a person who is involved in criminal activity to evade the legal consequences of his or her action
--
"the conversion, transfer, acquisition, possession or use of property derived from criminal activity" can be applied to a lot of situations.
Even a shop thief could be accused of money laundering.
Obviously it would be interesting to see how the judgment goes.
If there is any follow-up I'm very interested.
Even with every best intention in the world, it was enough to keep me multiple years ago from starting a business that might have been both beneficial to society and profitable to me. Money laundering laws favor huge corporations and serve as barriers to entry for small, disruptive, often consumer-friendly businesses. As your description implicitly concedes, you need lengthy access to very expensive lawyers to operate in this area, not to mention the cost of other compliance measures.
Like the rest of the drug war, such laws have been a huge net negative for society.
If they leave your trash cleaner than it was, what's the problem here?
This is why I run _all_ of my paper documents through a shredder before throwing them away. I don't have any immoral behavior to hide but I also have zero control over where my bank statements and such end up once they leave the end of my driveway.