States with bottle deposits - homeless employees of the state?

Ethical puzzle:

Say that your city has invested in a recycling program, with a separate bin for bottles, clean paper, and other materials that the city can collect and sell to a recycler or otherwise convert into revenue while reducing the load of garbage heading for its overtaxed dumps. Every week you put out your trash and your recyclables and the city trucks come by and pick them up.

And say that you have one or more guys (homeless or not) who come down the street every week, just before the trash trucks do, and rifle through the bins and take anything they can sell for cash.

In Los Angeles, the sanitation department used to run an ad campaign warning (in multiple languages) that this is a theft of city property, and they used to send cops and department personnel around to chase the bottle collectors away, but more recently they seem to have given up the fight, and a couple of rickety trucks come down my street to rummage through the trash, every week, late in the evening and again before dawn, on collection day.

What to make of this? Leviticus 19:9-10 sayeth: "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am YHVH your God." What say you?