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Hundreds of people walk down this sidewalk every day on their way to a suburban Shanghai Metro station. But most people barely glance at what’s behind the cement wall alongside a path that was rebuilt after a storm destroyed the old one.

Tons of trash is spread out behind the wall, in a landscape that looks nothing like the neatly-kept grounds nearby -- an enormous apartment community built by China’s biggest real estate developer, the Spring Company. A “dream home” here costs at least 25,000 yuan per square meter. Many of the residents are expats.

This couple's life depends on the garbage delivered by these tricycles from Spring Community

The garbage behind the wall comes mostly from these expensive homes – everything from empty milk cartons to abandoned household appliances. Sadly, the area is also home to five poor families who live in -- and live on -- the garbage.

They buy the garbage from bell-ringing rag pickers on tricycles, and then sort it and resell it to a recycling center. The price difference is their profit. Each family here deals with a different kind of garbage, including used paper, wood, plastic, glass and metal.

One of these families is a couple – we'll call them Mr. Zhou and Mrs. Li (not their real names). They have been living here for five years. They are in the metal business; their “house” was built from what they found. The walls are old avionic doors and window frames. They use old rice cookers to store the old cans and other kinds of metal they find. And Mrs. Li grows green onions in a container that was once part of an old television set. They also have their own working TV set, but with no cable or satellite service, they have a choice of only five channels. But there is no washing machine – they do their laundry by hand.

Green onion is grown in a self-made container

“We have a strict routine every day: working from 6a.m. till 9p.m.,” said Mrs. Li. “We barely make any exceptions because if we stop working, then we stop making money to support ourselves.”

And she seems quite optimistic. “We don’t want to work for other people and we’d like to be our own bosses, since bosses outside usually exploit workers and bully them quite often.”

Although they are “bosses”, the money they make is not much more than what normal workers, such as car wash attendants, masseuses in salons or waiters in any restaurant earn every month in Shanghai – a total of around 2200 yuan. The last thing they want to happen to them is to get sick, not only because of the expense of seeing a doctor (they have no social insurance), but also because the work is too much for only one person to handle.