This is new?

Back in the early 90s when I was living in Chicagoland I was told that at some point the city had distributed new standardized curbside trash cans to residents that the trucks could pick up and dump using a handle on the back side of the cans, this handle was an aluminum tube about 24 inches long, and in very short order most of them had been stolen and sold to scrap dealers.

I also read that within the last could years that people were cutting down street lights in Baltimore to cart away and sell for scrap.