At the waste drop-off in Simon's Town, the Malawian sifts through every garbage bag, separating the hard plastics from the soft, the glass from the junk.
Behind him is a large metal container full of stories - a suitcase that went to Mauritius, the corpse of a lawnmower, a battered surfboard and a briefcase well past its corporate prime.
The container is also home to piles of dead technology, layered like sedimentary rock, a cross-section of time - video tapes, bulky computer screens, the skeletal remains of an old amp and a video projector.
This is one of 24 municipal recycling depots in Cape Town where mini economic ecosystems have sprung up in the shadows between the destitute and the privileged.
According to mayoral committee member for utility services Ernest Sonnenberg, 128 permanent council staff are employed at the drop-off facilities, and 220 people are employed through contractors.
A "best drop-off" challenge has sparked a competitive spirit among staff, explaining why each site has landscaped flowerbeds bedecked with used objects, says Sonnenberg.
As for the daily functioning of a waste drop-off, it is a careful process of deciding what goes where.
"Old stuff that is still usable is for sale," says Nocawe van Rensburg, who signs in every vehicle that arrives at the Simon's Town drop-off.
"Magazines and papers are taken elsewhere to be recycled. Rubble from buildings goes to informal settlements where roads need fixing. The gas heaters we send away - they're too dangerous. Stuff that can't go anywhere else goes to the landfill."
It is quiet here, under the watchful eye of a bruised garden gnome that sits atop a flowerbed covered with old objects and tyres painted red and white.
But then a silver Mercedes-Benz with a roof rack purrs in. Its owner, a blonde wearing high heels, opens the boot to reveal an array of unwanted goods ordered on the internet and boxes that once held Le Creuset cooking pots.
"People bring in things they could still use. Maybe there's just a screw loose and I wonder how they could throw it away," says sorter Ighsaan Sapat.
At the Hout Bay drop-off, the patchwork flowerbed rises into a set of steps topped with a lookout point from which the mansions of the mink-and-manure belt appear locked in a face-off with the flammable shacks of Imizamo Yethu.
In Wynberg, 10km away, Remus Nzuzinzau, 24, wears a top hat covered in gold sequins while he drags branches and rubbish from the boots of cars.
"It was a gift from someone who brings their rubbish here," he says, running his fingers across the sequins.
He was two years into a degree at an agricultural university in the Democratic Republic of Congo when war forced him to flee Kinshasa to South Africa.
"In winter it rains and people don't clean their yards, then I don't get as many shifts," he says, "but all the time, I dream of going back to university."
Behind Nzuzinzau, or "Congo" as he is called by his colleagues, a haze of hay fever rises into the air as machines process the garden refuse and branches dropped off by residents and contractors.
Transported to Paarl, it passes through a giant chipping machine onto a compost heap and eventually reappears for sale at R30 per neatly packed bag. "We sell 30 or 40 a day," says waste drop-off supervisor Trust Matinyenya.
Not far away, at NGO Oasis Recycling, people with intellectual disabilities form part of an ecosystem in which unloved books are dismantled and pulped, gently used goods get a new life in the bric-a-brac shop, and 3-D glasses from trips to the cinema are collected in a big blue bucket.
"We get 250 to 500 cars coming here daily," says recycling manager Beraldine Jagers. "And every bit counts."
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