Lately I've been spending most of my week working at Working Bikes. The co-op's mission is to take bikes from the trash and ship them to the third world, but we're still trying to figure out how to do it. One wasteful American's trash is a bikeless Kenyan's treasure, but how to get them there?

My primary role is at the scrapyard. Scrappers pick up anything metal from the alley and bring it to a big chipper on north Kingsbury. We try to intercept any bikes and wheelchairs and buy them for a buck or two, which is better than the fifty cents they get for the metal. Needless to say, I'm learning a lot of Spanish terms for bike parts, because the majority of the scrappers are hispanic. Many of them are also drunk, which is interesting considering that we do this starting at 5 AM. It's a dangerous place- giant claws and magnet cranes rumbling past, trucks full of crushed cars or rebar, and hundreds of beat-up old pickup trucks piled high with refridgerators and radiators, spilling over the bed but tied with electrical cords, and being driven by guys who are three-fourths of the way through a 6-pack by eight AM.

Africans want mountain bikes. Chicagoans want flashy road bikes. So we separate them, taking the road bikes (and any fancy MTB we come across) down to the warehouse to be repaired and sold here, while the bikes bound for Africa go right into a shipping container. At the yard where the container is kept, we have to give a bike to the security guards every time we bring a truckload in. Sorta like slipping a fiver to the doorman, but much less subtle.