A Nickel’s Worth
The Hardscrabble Lives of New York’s Canners
The roll-up gate is closed after hours at Sure We Can, a redemption center in Brooklyn, New York. Photo Allan Kew.At 7:30 a.m. they wait outside the rollup gate surrounded by bulging plastic bags and beer-bottle boxes. One man sorts out aluminum cans and plastic bottles from his grocery cart into bags brimming with 5¢ deposits. Another man sorts out glass bottles – he’s already been through 16 boxes and more await. Others frozen in place shiver for warmth in the winter morning. A luckier few recline inside their cars.
People get antsy in the cold – “Do you have a key?” someone asks. The morning’s opener is running late.
Ten canners, people who collect and redeem container deposits, line up outside Sure We Can before it opens. Early risers, maybe people who haven’t gone to sleep; for some the day is starting. But for many the workday never seems to end. The sun in the east hangs low. Children queue up outside an adjacent public school, and while the rest of the world sleeps, the neighborhood’s canners hope to rush inside for payday.
It’s 7:40 a.m. when the gate rolls up at the redemption center in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
The cacophony commences – the consistent hollow crash of empty aluminum cans and plastic bottles, and the ring of glass bottles like glassware shoved into cupboards.
By 8:00 there’s nearly 20 canners sorting, counting and being paid out for their collections – and it’s a wonder if it was ever quiet.
The earth shakes as the L train passes beneath the redemption center. Overhead, planes fly low towards New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
A symphony of voices rises, conversing in Spanish, Mandarin and English. The center accommodates everyone, and displayed in various locations are the basic words of the trade translated between the three most commonly spoken languages, like numbers one through ten and the word for can – “lata” and “guàn”.
***
Canners are a common sight on the city’s streets, instantly identifiable by their grocery cart caravans loaded with bags and boxes of recycling. It’s a precarious profession, steeped in environmentalism and legal grayness, staffed by the city’s marginalized. It’s long been a tough life for the canners, but the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic fallout has only made matters worse, as rising costs make 5¢ deposits worth less and less.
The standard canner caravan, a grocery cart loaded with bulging bags of aluminum cans and plastic bottles, abandoned as its owner searched the recycling bin in Morningside Heights Park in Manhattan. Photo Allan Kew.The national cost of living has chaotically increased throughout the pandemic, with few signs of stabilization or reduction. From January 2022 to 2023 the national Consumer Price Index rose 6.4%, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s a trend that peaked at 8.5% in March 2022, the largest 12 month increase since 1981. The New York and New Jersey areas alone experienced a 6% increase from January 2022 to January 2023, and average rents in the city rose from $2,900 in January 2020 and $3,450 in January 2023.
“Right now, it’s expensive. It’s hard to live in,” said Pedro, a committed Brooklyn canner. “I like it. This job, you don’t need nothing else. Just the space.”
This unofficial workforce relies on New York’s Returnable Container Act, known as the Bottle Bill, a law placing a 5¢ deposit on most single-use beverage containers sold in state. The program encourages greater recycling from consumers, and in a place as densely populated as New York City, avoid widespread littering and the loss of recyclable materials within solid waste disposal.
Any consumer can earn back their deposit, by returning it to the place of purchase, a reverse-vending machine, or through a redemption center. But most are oblivious of the tax or not concerned with losing 5¢. Enter canners.
There’s no accurate count of the city’s canners. Consulting group Eunamia estimated in a 2019 report there are 4,000 to 8,000 people, while Sure We Can, a nonprofit redemption center where canners deposit their collections, estimates some 10,000 canners sort through New York’s trash. They are a diverse and intersectional workforce including immigrants and homeless, running the gamut from novelty chore to full-time job.
To the uninitiated, canners appear to aimlessly roam the city’s streets looking for cans, but there is nothing random about their routines. They follow routes and regular schedules – mornings, afternoons and nights - to maximize their collection. They know the garbage cycles of restaurants and residential buildings, developing business relationships among themselves and the world of consumers.
***
Sure We Can was founded by Sister Ana Martinez de Luco and Eugene Gadsden, two former canners, in 2007 after a nonprofit redemption center in Manhattan closed. Already canners, they seized the opportunity to create a cooperative redemption center that would put the interests of canners first. The center changed locations multiple times before permanently settling at 219 McKibben Street in East Williamsburg in 2010.
A 2015 New York Times profile of Martinez documented her path from joining the nunship at 19 to moving to New York in 2004. She took “a faith-based decision to join the brothers and sisters who live on the street,” and with Gadsen, a well-known canner, embarked on a mission to support the city’s most vulnerable. Both Martinez and Gadsden have since moved onto other advocacy projects and are now unaffiliated with the center. They declined to be interviewed for this story.
The redemption center sits on 12,000 square foot lot bounded by apartment buildings, a playground, a brick-and-mortar industrial space and a public school. Fenced in by corrugated walls and decaled in vibrant spray paint displays, Sure We Can exemplifies the upbeat industrial legacy of its neighborhood. The center operates as a canner collective with goals for “social inclusion,” “environmental sustainability” and “economic development,” according to its website.
Inside is a roughshod spot centered by a decades-old mobile home serving as a command center for the operation. Within the camper’s entrance is a cash register and at the back is an office. Just outside the mobile home are plywood and corrugated-plastic roofed sorting tables and a warehouse, enclosed by shipping containers sometimes double stacked and stuffed with recycling bags full of plastic bottles or cans. What doesn’t fit overflows into the open, awaiting distributors to arrive and collect their used products.
Sure We Can’s operations center is located inside a mobile home in the heart of the Brooklyn property. Canners and local artists have painted murals all across the lot, often representing the very customers who frequent the redemption center. Photo Allan Kew.For as wild as the scene appears, everything has its place and use under the sun. Cans and plastic bottles are bagged: 240 cans, 144 plastic bottles. Glass bottles are packed 24 to a box, 96 boxes stacked on a pallet in the warehouse, plastic-wrapped into formation and shifted around the center by forklift when space permits. Despite their ominous jingle, the stacks of bottles rarely break.
Ryan Castalia, the center’s executive director, estimated their 1,000 canner network redeems approximately 1 million containers a month. Some faces remain familiar despite the sheer numbers. One frequent pair are partners Pedro and Josefa, who ask that only their first names be used. Thanks to their income from canning, they’ve been able to put one child through college and buy a home in Mexico. That house is their continually delay retirement. Another is Alberto Miguel Rosero, for whom canning is avid hobby and side-gig.
Every canner arriving at this redemption center follows two paths. The first, merely counting their collection, nets the canner the standard 5¢ deposit per container. The collections are taken to the warehouse's rear, where employees sort by hand by compositions, sizes and brands. They tally their totals with a digital counter connected to a chute.
However, Sure We Can offers up to an extra 1.15, 1.25 and 1.5¢ per aluminum, plastic, or glass container if the canner chooses to sort their collection by distributor. This seemingly worthless addition can raise a standard 240 can bag’s worth from $12 to $14.76, plastic bottles from $7.20 to $9, and glass from $1.20 to $1.56.
Until the last few years the center’s future was stable. They paid roughly $6,000 a month in rent, until the landlord increased it to $9,000 in 2021. That, and an eviction request in February 2020 has dipped the center into a touch-and-go game as they tried to raise the fund necessary to buy the property. The price: $2.6 million.
They sought funds from the outside, including a successful $50,000 fundraiser, various grants and a loan.
But the deal stalled. Castalia said time spent securing their loans repeatedly delayed the purchase date, and by November they were ready to sign the papers. Then in December 2022 the landlord changed their mind.
***
On a dead and cold night in Williamsburg near 10:30 p.m. the L train from Manhattan is out of service. Business is slow without the island crowd. But a white work van cruises the streets, by appearances aimlessly, until it finally stops outside a happening spot on Bedford Avenue and N 7th Street.
Pedro exits with a baby blue grocery cart commonly used by New Yorkers traversing the streets with their foodstuffs. His is for garbage.
He grins and says, “This is my little cart.”
The cart fills fast and requires strapping bags to the handle and metal cage. He searches for containers in the few blue recycling bags left on the street, within recycling receptacles outside restaurants and houses, and he collects whatever he finds littered on the curb.
“When me and Josefa started with the recycle, walking. Just parking the van one way and start walking.”
Over time their operation narrowed its focus. They target busy nights, recycling days, when the trash gets put out and what building crews will take out the trash.
But they likewise enterprise. The pair buy other canners’ hauls – sometimes at a discount – and return to Sure We Can to collect the difference and the extra fee from sorting. Their resolve leads to a constant bulk inventory they store at the redemption center.
But tonight Pedro ambles through Williamsburg without luck. Its too dead to find any business. The pair try the Greenpoint neighborhood but find no more success.
They call it early; it’s midnight. They must get up at 6:00 a.m. to make an exchange with another canner – that’s where the money is.
***
Josefa came to New York in 1986 at 17, as she describes “very, very young.” Pedro arrived in the city in 1989. Each grew up in Puebla, one of Mexico’s states, and there they shared a teenage romance that ultimately ended before Josefa left Mexico. In turn they lived separate lives. Josefa married and had four daughters; Pedro married and had two daughters and a son.
Yet he never forgot his love from Puebla. After all, he chose to come to New York for her. Love blossomed once again after they found each other in the big city.
Josefa was a seamstress back in Mexico, but found the profession in the states too intensive with low pay. She was the first of the pair to start canning – she alone controls her time and labor.
“This is much better for me,” she says.
It was not an easy transition for Pedro. For years he worked odd jobs in food service and as a delivery man. He thought canning was a profession for lazy people.
“I said, ‘this job is for lazy guys, it’s not for me’.” He soon learned the opposite. “Now, I say it’s not for lazy guys.”
They start their day in typical New Yorker fashion: a bagel and coffee. They work more than 40 hours a week, rising early in the morning to sort and scrounging for containers into the wee hours of the night. Some days after working late the pair return to Sure We Can early the next morning since its nearby their home.
The couple carry their collections inside and begin the day by arranging around their sorting space half a dozen or more empty recycling bags. They tie the bags to the sorting tables using twine, and in the center they place either a bag of mixed cans or bottles. They, like many other longtime canners, pre-sorted their collections by type of contain while prowling the streets.
They dive into a mixed bag from their outings and sort by rapidly tossing containers into bags determined by the distributor, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Corona. Josefa, in her 50’s, will sit and sift most of the day. In winter she wears nearly the same uniform every day to work: Ugg boots, sweatpants, and a warm jacket with faux fur at the neck line.
Pedro, 54, will stand and replace the mixed bag with another once they finished sorting. He mixes his look, but typically wears a heavy jacket and either a beanie or baseball cap. They wear thick surgical gloves to handle the often wet and sticky containers, and don rain ponchos if the weather turns bad or if it’s a particularly sticky bag.
With their bulk inventory in storage at the center, sorting can take up most of the day. When they run out of mixed bags Pedro retrieves another from storage, a corner pile that looms nearly 20 feet in the air. They avoid glass bottles out of weight concerns.
“We’re past 50,” a reflection on time and ability. Pedro shrugs it off – if a canner has bottles to unload they’ll take them off their hands.
Even still, retirement is in their minds. They have a one-bedroom home in Puebla, their postponed future due to the rising cost of living in the states. Initially they estimated moving back in two or three years – now they believe five.
They don’t plan an idle retirement. Business ideas swirl around the constant question of what’s next.
“When we get there we’ll figure it out,” says Pedro.
They and others say the pandemic changed the business. It seems indecipherable, but they believe people are not spending or wasting as they did before. Another reason could be more casual or dedicated canners are on the street. But it’s difficult to ascertain without an adequate account of New York’s redemption system; meanwhile, the redemption rate has slightly risen and lowered during the pandemic.
***
By several metrics the bottle redemption system is a success. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation website states the bottle bill led to the removal of 70% of roadside litter, and in 2020 alone canners and dedicated consumers helped recycle “5.5 billion plastic, glass and aluminum beverage containers totaling 241,505 tons.”
There are multiple means to redeem a container’s deposit, including returning it to the place of purchase or through a reverse vending machine. However, there are total limits for returns at retailers and vending machines are often out of order. The preferred method for many canners is through a redemption center, a state-permitted business that collects and sorts containers for pick-up from container distributors. Centers pay canners the 5¢ per container, and in return are reimbursed the 5¢ from distributors plus a 3.5¢ handling fee.
New York’s average redemption rate averaged 64.9% from 2013 to 2021, according to the Container Recycling Institute’s data. They estimate only 5% of redeemable containers are recycled through traditional curbside garbage disposal. However, the pandemic also plays a factor in recycling, as the state’s redemption rate increased from 64% in 2019 to 70% in 2021. There are 83 redemption centers in the city’s boroughs, according to a Department of Environmental Conservation FOIL request for permitted redemption centers.
Nearly all redemption centers operate as for-profit small businesses. Sure We Can is the exception, “founded by canners for canners” and organized around principles of “social awareness and sustainable practice in the broader community,” according to its website. They coordinate with distributors for container pick-ups, although not all distributors service Sure We Can. That means certain containers cannot be redeemed there, but can be taken elsewhere.
The problem is canners and redemption centers have more or less operated under the same guidelines since the 1982 Returnable Container Act, with periodic updates including an expanded redeemability to water bottles and an increased handling fee. The pandemic has brough to light the bill’s antiquations and forced canners to reckon with their profession.
***
The center operates on cruise control at noon. Canners cycle through, surrounded by murals depicting immigrant children, a push-cart canner, a yellow ribbon that says “immigrant respect”, a dragon hoarding cans and an unfinished portrait. Customers stake their sorting and counting spots at the tables, and if there’s no room they proceed on the cement ground with milk crates and recycling bags.
The sun diffuses the cold temperatures, and behind the trailer is a curious new popping sound, like stepping on bubble wrap. Set out in the sun, the thousands of plastic bottles are expanding with gas and pushing out their dents. Bags and palates pile up between pick-ups from distributors. Near the holidays the problem becomes acutely present as they run out of storage room.
Occasionally a food cart arrives, and people break to buy a meal. Otherwise, they may go to the corner bodega for a bite to eat, or share food someone has brought.
Canners will confer among each other whether the center redeems one particular container or if something is redeemable at all. Regulars instinctively reply in rapid gestures and head shakes.
People are congenial in an office sort of way. They mingle, talk without the water cooler, tell jokes and ask for advice. Arguments or disagreements are rare. Canners break into little jigs or dance to the music on the radio – jocular moments that break up long days.
They will even share among themselves, sometimes to round out a full bag. What is five cents to help a coworker? When they’re ready they call for one of the center’s full or part-time staff to review the haul, tabulate the total with a tablet and get paid in the camper.
***
Nearby, Alberto Miguel Rosero slowly, almost leisurely, sorts through his collection. He takes up residence at the sorting tables, often on the other side from Josefa and Pedro. He dons a black graduation-style gown to protect his clothes beneath. His collection is smaller, closer to what most canners bring in.
After pushing in his cart, brimming or barren, he lays out his collection on the table and uses milk cartons to sort. He is a more deliberate sorter who takes his time at the tables.
He is indifferent with how much he brings in. It matches his calmness, a consistent cool head while out canning, now while sorting. For him it’s not a profession, but a lucrative hobby.
***
The gradual shift from refillable to single-use containers led to an explosion of litter in the 1950’s. Vermont passed the first bottle bill in 1953 banning the sale of non-refillable beer bottles, according to the New York Association of Counties website, but the law expired after four years. In 1971 Oregon would go on to pass the first modern iteration of a bottle bill which placed a deposit on disposable containers.
New York’s Bottle Bill, passed in 1982, initially only placed a 5¢ deposit on beer and soda containers. Further updates in the 1990’s and 2000’s expanded the range of containers, including bottled water, and an increased handling fee for retailers and redemption centers.
Today, 10 states have bottle bills guaranteeing a redeemable deposit ranging from five to fifteen cents and sometimes dependent on the container’s size. New York’s deposit rate remains 5¢ for all containers.
All qualifying beverage containers are required to have a 5¢ deposit paid as an economic incentive to recycle, placing an initial burden upon consumers. Ideally, the bill course corrects to reduce overall litter and waste, and unburden municipal garbage collection. Ultimately the beverage industry retakes possession of their waste products and upcycles it into new products. Unredeemed deposits are split 80% and 20% between the state and beverage industry, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The directs unclaimed deposits to its Environmental Protection Fund.
Various groups have lobbied for another bill update in the state assembly and senate. These groups believe doubling the deposit rate, expanding the categories of redeemable containers, and increasing the handling fee to 5¢ will raise the statewide recycling rate. Current law excludes milk, juice, wine and liquor containers.
Ryan Carson, campaign coordinator for the Bottle Bill 40 Coalition, said the added incentives could encourage greater consumer buy in.
“What if you could recycle 10 cans and get a dollar back?”
The coalition is composed of 300 members, many of them redemption centers, and it advocates raising the deposit rate to 10¢ and the handling fee to 5¢.
The bill and it’s mission has also often been framed as an issue between New York’s haves and have-nots. William E. Geist documented a scene of diverse canners emblematic of the community in a 1984 New York Times’ article. He quotes one canner waiting to redeem their haul.
“The government decided to give us the garbage. There are folks who can afford to throw the cans away and there are folks who can't afford not to pick it up. I guess it's a blessing.”
***
At 9:00 a.m. Rosero, 58, sets off in East Williamsburg from the Montrose Avenue subway station. His direction is northward along a predetermined path. He wears a blue baseball cap with red ear mufflers, his graduation gown and black boots. His black pushcart has a spare wheel attached to the front – for emergencies. He stacks glass bottles on their side in the cage, and ties separate bags for cans and plastic bottles on the cart’s handle.
Tagging along induces delirium, as you wind through industrial and residential streets – sometimes a mix of both – going through every recycling container he comes across. He doesn’t dig: he peeks beneath the lid and immediately knows if there’s anything valuable. Occasionally he will lift out a blue recycling bag to inspect; but his quick eye rarely misses anything.
East Williamsburg’s streets are second-nature for Rosero. He instinctively knows what buildings don’t typically recycle, although he checks all the same. On one such block, where according to him no one ever recycles, his acumen reasons the final home’s bin occasionally has redeemable containers. Sure enough, only the last bin has a few cans and plastic bottles.
He left Ecuador at age 15 in 1980. He was so against moving to New York that he almost ran away. But his grandmother convinced him to seek more opportunities with his family in the states. He played soccer for a time, but eventually became a referee in Queens.
His two-decade refing career is entering its twilight years and he’s uncertain what comes next. Meanwhile he has canning, a job he began a decade ago with his partner, Rosa Mite, to earn extra money for their children.
“We started to save money for my kids; all money before, for them.”
Now the children are grown and Mite quit canning and works at Sure We Can as their client services director. She digitally documents every canner’s haul on a tablet. While on the job two years ago a pole pierced her leg at Sure We Can. As she recovered Rosero took up some of the household responsibilities, including cooking, a chore that turned into a passion.
He cooks three times a week, all different recipes culled from the Internet. A grin grows as he shows the different recipes he has dared attempt. Although the Ecuadorian dish seco de pollo – chicken stew – is dear to his heart, he can’t decide what his favorite dish to make.
“Everything, everything, everything!”
When not refing or cooking Rosero cans for himself. He thinks of the job as a hobby, a quasi-side hustle that involves a healthy amount of morning air, walking, and the occasional profitable payday. On a good day he makes $40; but it’s day by day and if any competition is afoot. If there’s anything he admonishes, its competition.
Throughout the morning he finds mangled recycling bags torn open and discarded. Someone is cruising and tearing through the trash for containers. Rosero is more delicate. He unties the bag, removes what is redeemable, then reties it shut. If he has to tear the bag open he uses the remaining length of tie to reseal the bag as best as he can.
The rifled bags frustrate him. Professionally, this is not the way to do things.
“This is the right way. Open it and close it,” he says.
Josefa and Pedro feel the same way.
“This is how the recycling people do it,” said Pedro. “That’s the respect for everybody.”
Rosero encounters several other canners, exchanging acknowledging glances as colleagues. But then he sees the mangler. He knows her, and he says she’s trouble.
Normally when he comes across another canner on the same street, he will turn around to concede the street’s recycling. Regarding the mangler, he circles back, gets what he can, and flees to the next street over to avoid a confrontation. He predicts she will try and beat him to the next block. Sure enough she comes around the corner after he’s midway through the next block over.
“She do it like a competition. When I see people like that, I go the other way.”
As noon approaches, he stops and rests outside an apartment building. He has an arrangement with an employee there, who will notify him when the recycling will be placed curbside. But his contact hasn’t called and Rosero doesn’t feel like waiting. After 20 minutes he quits and he heads toward Sure We Can. It’s a so-so haul without the complex’s trash; he estimates $20.
***
Changes to redemption management could have adverse consequences for canners.
Dr. Steven Alan Cohen, senior vice dean and professor of public affairs at Columbia University, noted that sustainability and deposit value increases are contradictory to canners’ livelihoods. Reusable containers mean less waste, and more deposit value means more conscious consumers – a 10¢ deposit, like the Bottle Bill 40 coalition proposed, will encourage wider redemption
“If you have a dollar in your pocket, and it falls to the ground, do you pick it up? If it’s a nickel, do you pick it up?”
When there are lags between recycling pick-ups, the Brooklyn-based redemption center Sure We Can is often overrun with bags and boxes brimming full of cans, plastic and glass bottles. Photo Allan Kew.Carson, the Bottle Bill 40’s campaign coordinator, doesn’t believe an increase will negatively affect canners.
“New York being one of the wealthiest cities in the world, there’s always going to be a population that doesn’t go out of it’s way to go to a redemption center.”
He’s not entirely wrong – there are no permanent redemption centers in Manhattan, meaning the area is a deposit desert. Canners on the island must arrange pick-up or travel away.
Canners have expressed mixed feelings about the raise, weighing both a boon to their paychecks but likely more competition. Accumulatively, they remain an unrecognized workforce for New York’s waste management. Martin Naro, co-founder and CEO of redemption technology company Evtek, argued that canners are the best means of properly recycling containers.
“Canners are some of the most effective workers in the waste disposal industry, although they’re not represented through formal employment.”
According to him curbside pickup of recycling by waste management has a higher rate of contamination, meaning the recycled materials are less pure and ultimately more difficult to upcycle. Canners, by proxy, presort recyclable materials out of the garbage supply and lower contamination risk. Canners are an essential workforce since they intimately know their neighborhood’s recycling habits and usually trawl their own neighborhoods, thereby preventing contamination.
“It’s imperative we legitimize the canning community. It’s imperative to come up with ways for people to value their recyclables, and more importantly, be rewarded for participating in recycling systems.”
Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for the city’s Department of Sanitation, stated by email that “anyone who recycles metal, glass, plastic, or paper is helping the City meet its goals of sending less material to landfill.”
However, he declined to elaborate if the department plans to formalize relations, reiterating from his previous statement that they “do not oppose any New Yorker redeeming cans and bottles to make ends meet.”
Jomo Miller, a public information officer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation praised the bottle bill for catching “an average of five billion beverage containers each year with 250,000 tons of plastic, glass, and aluminum recycled,” and for “improving litter control, providing relief to overburdened municipal recycling systems, and increasing beverage container recycling.”
The department did not comment about formalizing relations with the state’s canners.
***
Winter dissipates in Williamsburg as the sun rises. The cold only lingers in shadows.
At 9:00 a.m Pedro and Josefa park their van in the backstreets of Roebling Street and Union Avenue’s residences and businesses. This morning marks the confluence of trade secrets that lead to success: it’s garbage day and no other canners have searched through the trash yet.
The pair fall into routine; Josefa stays with the van, Pedro ventures out.
Today’s schedule revolves around timetables and contacts. After canning in this location for years, they either know by habit when a residential complex’s trash goes out or through a building employee. When they get word or see the pile go out, they must be ready to strike – garbage trucks are not far behind.
Still, there’s no sense in waiting around – he searches the neighborhood’s outdoor bins for containers. He peeps beneath lids or moves on. But today he constantly digs in – nearly everyone has thrown something valuable away.
The pair’s acquaintance runs deep in the neighborhood. While walking Pedro runs into an old friend and they exchange some words in Spanish.
Eventually he reaches this neighborhood’s borders and returns to Josefa. Now they wait – their connection hasn’t said when the trash is going out. All they know is it’s down the block, in view of the van’s mirrors. Pedro leaves to use a restroom.
In this quiet moment before their connection pays through, Josefa describes their one bedroom home in Puebla, located in what she refers to as “el campo”, or a field, with a view of the “sierras.”
Division is in mind when thinking of this someday retirement.
“I love this place, pero, I love my Mexico.”
Josefa was 17 when she arrived 36 years ago. The city is different now – it has become a toll booth whose rates keep going up.
“This city, everyone paying pay pay.”
The end of their New York adventure is uncertain. In January they estimated only two or so years before they returned to Mexico. Now they plan to open their own redemption center, with Sure We Can as a partner. While it means a larger nest egg, it likewise means a greater postponement. They guess they are five years away from returning home.
The trash goes out. Josefa rushes in with the little cart and bags in tow, soon joined by Pedro. It is an abundant collection with a twist: they discover five unopened soda cans. They’ll redeem those later.
Not long after another excursion – this time outside a restaurant – noon arrives and with it a free meal from a church around the corner. The pair reclines against a building and eat a hardy meal of ground beef, country potatoes, beets, dry rye bread, a small apple and raisins. They get extras for later, for there are several more pick-ups in the next few hours.
Meanwhile, a garbage truck passes by and collects the trash they already sorted.
***
According to Castalia, the center and their landlord reopened negotiations in February to buy the lot. What ensued was a rocky path forward, as private loans were jeopardized by fears of potential environmental remediation from prior industrial use of the lot. The situation grew dire enough that he considered relocating Sure We Can to a new site.
A move may negatively impact their canner community to some degree, since the center’s location sustains their network. Some canners may need to travel further; some may go elsewhere. It would be anyone’s guess where the regulars would end up. It would likewise mean a satellite site for Pedro and Josefa to operate would not happen.
In early March the center and landlord reached a purchasing agreement at the original $2.6 million price. Barring any further interruptions, the deal closes at the end of March.
“It’s a huge threshold for us in terms of stability,” Castalia said.
By owning the lot, he can expand center’s presence in the city. This would include Pedro and Josefa’s satellite center and possibly a mobile center that drives around the city meeting canners where they collect. Regardless of the property sale, he also plans to move forward with a “canner census”, an ambitious accounting project of the city’s canners to better advocate on their behalf.
But it all hinges on the cold calculus behind New York real estate. Like everything in the pandemic, it’s wait and see.
***
At 4:50 p.m. the gate rolls back down. It stops late comers from entering and forces the last customers to wrap up their work – if necessary they can return tomorrow and finish.
While the radio plays the symphony of voices and cacophony of containers gradually subside. Occasionally the ring of glass returns, but it’s someone departing into the evening. The remaining canners want payment – their last order of business for the day, before going home, before heading back out into the streets. People exchange goodbyes and they wave each other off.
At 5:00 p.m. Sure We Can is a ghost town. Silence overtakes the lot as the last employee exits and padlocks a steel door beside the rollup gate. It’s a wonder anyone was ever here at all.
This article was completed at Columbia University School of Journalism from October 2022 to March of 2023 under the supervision of Professor Ari Goldman. This story is dedicated to the memory of Ryan Carson.