“Each week my family separates our recyclables from our regular trash. The former are put in our blue bin and are placed out on the curb for pickup on Wednesday mornings.
Last Tuesday night, I walked to Westwood Village to attend a dinner when I saw two individuals diving into all of my neighbours’ recycling bins (which were on the street curb) to extract the recyclables.
These "entrepreneurs" had a large truck filled with plastic bottles and aluminium cans that they were clearly loading up to take to a place to collect the recyclables fees. Is this a crime?
I view it as an economic crime for the following reason. The only reason this "trash treasure" was easy to access in the blue bins on the street was because the well meaning law abiding citizens wasted their time sorting their trash and kindly placing it outside.
Our tax dollars goes to the unionized guys who drive the recyclable trucks to pick this stuff up. If there is nothing to pick up, because the pirates have stolen the treasure, then recyclable trucks are losing $ as they are bringing in no revenue. So, this operating profit loss is just a transfer from the city to the pirates. My tax dollars and my time are being used to transfer $ to pirates.
The environment is no cleaner and is likely to dirtier because of the duplication of transportation (the recycling truck and the dirty private pirate trucks). I saw the same thing in Berkeley. What is to be done? A green cop shooting tranquilizer darts?”
Source: Environmental and Urban Economics: Recycling Dumpster Diving: A "Victimless" Crime?
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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