old videos – da caricare

I see this scenario more and more often, at least in Rome and Barcelona (the cities where I spend most of my time): gipsy men and women arrive at the trash bins in the street with their little chariots, and start fishing for something. This is a video of the bins in my street. The traffic is impressive: in a single morning, if you stay few hours at the window, you’ll see 9-10 different people coming at intervals, dive in the trash without caring at all about the smell or the dirt (some of them literally put their entire upper body inside the bin, you only see they butt and legs). And they search. Often they have a hook to grab the stuff. Now the question I haven’t had answered so far is: what the heck do they search for? I don’t think they go for food. I saw them grabbing pieces of solid stuff. Like metal bars. Plastic panels. Little furniture. Someone suggested me that they resell that stuff. But really, is there such a market for those things, a market that justifies this huge traffic of people coming back and forth to browse the trash? It looks also like it’s a competitive market, since they do very frequent trips, like if they want to grab something as soon as it’s trown away, before someone else gets it.