States with bottle deposits - homeless employees of the state?

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.
I thought trash became public domain once it hit the curb.