“It’s good for the environment,” says Anthony Pemberton, arranging the recyclable empty bottles and cans in his shopping cart. “And I’m a conservationist. You do also get five cents per can, which is a motivator.”
It is a cold Sunday morning, and a small crowd of people are beginning to gather outside a redemption center in south-west Brooklyn. It’s starting to drizzle; the smell of stale beer hangs in the air.
A woman in a puffy coat and plastic arm protectors only identifies herself as being 50 years old and originally from Guangdong province, China. She says she works in a bar, where the owner allows her to take the recyclable containers every week. She offloads 12 milk crates full of beer cans from a broken Home Depot shopping cart, personalized with added handles for enhanced maneuverability. With her week’s haul, she estimates she can net between $20 and $30. When asked if she would like to be interviewed in English, she laughs.
“If I could speak English,” she told me in Mandarin, “I wouldn’t have to be doing this.”
Container deposit-return legislation – often colloquially referred to as “bottle bills” after the 1971 Oregon Bottle Bill, the earliest American instance of this type of legislation – is present in 10 US states. These laws all reflect the same general system: when a beverage container is sold, a small fee, usually five cents, is added to the original cost; that fee is then returned to whoever recycles it at an authorized redemption center – there are 143 of them located in all five boroughs, but mostly in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. New York’s bottle bill, the New York State Returnable Container Act, went into effect in 1983.
Bottle bills are intended to encourage recycling and curtail littering, and have been generally quite effective in that regard: the average recycling rate across the United States is approximately 33%, while the rate in New York state is 70%. But another, less intended consequence has also resulted: the formation of an entire sub-industry of people who scavenge for discarded recyclable containers and redeem them.
They call themselves lateros in Spanish or huishou ren in Mandarin; in English, they’re canners. They plot careful routes around the city, having taken into account recycling and trash pick-up days, and rummage through residents’ bags late at night for plastic and aluminum containers. It is not easy work. Pemberton’s Tuesday schedule, for instance, starts at midnight on New York Avenue and goes until noon – a full 12-hour shift, two to four days a week.
Scavenging through trash is a legal gray area in New York: technically, according to the department of sanitation, the cans become city property once they’re curbside, but the “theft” of recyclables isn’t typically prosecuted, and sometimes, friendlier sanitation workers even stand aside and wait for canners like Pemberton to finish gathering cans before they collect the rest of the garbage. Pemberton hauls his cans in a shopping cart along the street throughout the year, despite severe weather: he was born in Aruba, he explains, so the summer heat isn’t too bad for him – but in the winter, he says, he often has to drag his cart through the snow.
He doesn’t like to talk about how much he earns from the cans, which, obviously, depends on how frequently he goes out to collect. At his peak, he was canning four days a week from midnight to noon. (In general, and as is fairly common, if a canner picks up 1,000 cans a week, they would earn $2,600 a year: five cents a can x 1,000 cans x 52 weeks.)
“You have to go out, and you have to go out a lot,” he says. “We’re hardworking people. It’s honest dollars. You don’t have to beg anyone, and you don’t have to knock anyone over the head.”
Now 58, Pemberton has been canning for most of his life. In 1983, when New York’s bottle bill went into effect, he was in his early 20s, working as a porter at a supermarket in Sheepshead Bay. To supplement his income, he began canning at night.
When he thinks back on his early days, he realizes the danger he could have encountered as a young black man, rummaging through trash near strangers’ homes in the early hours of the morning.
“I could’ve been shot,” he says. “It was nighttime, I didn’t know who I was going to meet. What was I doing out there? But I was young, I wasn’t thinking about anything.”
He feels safer now, though: canning has become more known, and people have grown accustomed to the sight of someone pushing a shopping cart full of recyclables down the street at an odd hour.
“Now they see me as a bottle person,” he says. “I’m just a bottle person. It’s changed.”
He has held a number of different jobs in the decades since, but he’s always supplemented his income with canning. These days, he works as a porter at a coffee chain in Manhattan.
“They pay OK,” he says, “but every little bit helps.”
Pemberton has accumulated a wealth of knowledge along the way. He likes to help other canners; one basic trick he likes to explain involves punching a small hole in the bottom of the plastic bags he uses to collect cans, so that excess liquid from the containers can easily drain out. He also tries to teach his colleagues, especially those who cannot read English, how to decipher the labelling on certain containers: not all are eligible for redemption. Initially, only beer and carbonated beverage containers were included under New York’s bottle bill. Since 2009, water bottles and other non-carbonated beverages also became eligible as returnable containers.
“Maybe I should start a school or something,” he says, laughing.
And certainly, there are more new canners every year. There is no official count of how many canners currently operate in New York City, but everyone I spoke to at the recycling centers tells me the number of canners has increased in the last 10 years. So has the number of new recycling redemption centers: 15 new redemption centers opened in 2009; 27 more opened the following year.
“When the economy’s bad, we get more people,” says Jose Midence, a manager at Boro Park redemption center. He has worked there for 25 years, and he has witnessed the growth in the canner population.
“And people drink more beer,” he adds, gesturing to the crates of empty beer bottles lining the walls of the redemption center.
More canners does mean more competition for Pemberton, but he doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.
“The real canners, we all try to help each other,” he says. “We’re in the struggle together.”