Informal recyclers in developing countries do manage to make a living simply from the revenues from selling the recovered materials.39 But with increasing resource scarcity and rising prices, situations also arise in which people can make a living by removing recyclables from the 'formal' systems in developed countries, or where it becomes in the interest of large national manufacturing companies in developing countries to 'compete' with both the city and the informal sector in offering MSWM sen/ices, in order to secure access to raw materials (see Box 5.1). A private collector can have higher profits by only focusing on densely populated regions where recoverable waste quantities can be collected within a small area, leading to regional 'cherry-picking'. In such cases, only the non-profitable regions are left to be serviced by public authorities.