Yesterday at 8:30 PM • Edited yesterday at 9:11 PM
He is a well-known figure in Tilburg: Teun van Maurik, who drives through the city with bags full of empty cans. But the tin king is in sackcloth and ashes. On King’s Night his mobility scooter was stolen. His sadness runs much deeper than the theft. “Stop judging and just help someone.”
Since the Tilburg fair of 2024, the whole of Tilburg knows who Teun van Maurik (59) is. During the fair he collected thousands of empty cans. Not only did it earn him a nice amount of money, he also attracted a lot of attention with his mobility scooter, which he used to drive through the city full of large garbage bags filled with deposits. Wearing a helmet with empty bottles and cans on his head, he had a cheerful chat with everyone.
Little is left of the apparent cheerfulness of that time the day after King’s Day. Heavily emotional, he tells his sad story in his garden about the prejudices people have about him after his three strokes. A tear is shed regularly. The frustrations he has been dealing with for years come to the surface after the theft.
On King’s Night he stops at the Pasja coffee shop on the Bredaseweg to get a joint. “Normally there is always security at the door, but he had just gone home sick.” Van Maurik shuffles in – he can barely walk – to order something, but forgets to take the key out of the ignition. He never does that, because the security guard at the door always keeps an eye on things.
When Van Maurik is outside again a few minutes later, his mobility scooter has disappeared. His world collapses. “There you are, I’m completely upset about it.” The next morning he reports the theft to the police. Without his cart, Van Maurik is confined to his home. Walking is very difficult, so collecting cans is out of the question for the time being. The cheerful man that Tilburg residents know from the street sits like a sad little bird in his garden.
“They insult me, call me a junkie.”
He sighs deeply again and takes a drag from his joint. Van Maurik has difficulty speaking, it seems as if he is heavily drunk when he says something. “I haven’t had a drink in three years, but I take a smoke every now and then to calm down and not go crazy.”
It is prejudices like these that visibly excite him. He notices it every day in the way people address him, on the street or online. “They insult me, call me a junkie. I talk like that because I have had three strokes.”
It is not easy for Van Maurik to be accepted for who he has become. Before his first stroke in 2015, he had his own glass and window frame company. Until disaster struck. In addition to the three cerebral infarctions, he also broke his back twice. Collecting empty cans and bottles became a necessary activity. He could supplement his benefits with the proceeds from the deposit.
“Stop judging and just help someone, just ask how things are going.”
Here sits a man who is at his wits’ end. The theft of his mobility scooter is the proverbial last straw. He calls on people to look out for each other more. Not just for themselves, but in general. “I hope people realize what they are doing to others by how they respond to others.” With tears in his eyes he concludes his speech for more respect: “Stop judging and just help someone, ask how things are going.”
After his success at the Tilburg Fair of 2024, where he worked for more than twelve hours for eight days and collected more than 8,000 cans, he also started collecting cans fanatically during carnival and he now has a permanent place at Poppodium 013, where he cleans up stray cans.
He doesn’t know yet whether he will go out on the street again to collect cans when he has a new mobility scooter. “I’m ready for some rest.”
