Where Rent Is $13,500, She Lives Off What’s Left at the Curb

Source: New York Times
Link to Article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/nyregion/collecting-cans-collectors-nyc.html

Where Rent Is ,500, She Lives Off What’s Left at the Curb
Canners and trucks converge in a shadow economy of the streets.

In recent years, an entire economic ecosystem has sprouted from the artificial turf of a 5-cent deposit. It includes fleets of trucks, clashes between canners uptown and between truckers at an open-air canning market downtown, price wars and middlemen and coordinated handoffs.

And now, tensions are growing over a proposal to expand the types of drinks that come under the deposit law. The measure would mean more money for canners, but an unlikely alliance of environmental activists, beverage companies and government officials opposes it.

A man in a truck meets Rosa at an assigned address. He rolls up his cargo door, loads in her bags and hands her a wad of cash: $10 for each bag of 200 cans and bottles. He drives off to his next corner, where another canner waits. And another, and another, until the 24-foot truck is full and the driver heads off to a teeming lot beside an industrial alley 20 miles away where other trucks plying other neighborhoods bring their precious cargo of throwaways.

On the Upper East Side, big, well-staffed apartment houses and newer luxury towers generate fortress-size heaps of carefully organized trash. Residents are both conscientious recyclers — the neighborhood has one of the city’s highest recycling rates — and rich enough not to worry about tossing away a nickel.

But the price of Manhattan real estate has also forced every dedicated bottle-and-can redemption center off the island, leaving canners to feed their containers one at a time into supermarket redemption machines, which can impose a $12-per-day limit, or lug them to recycling centers in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn.

Into this void have stepped redemption companies that send out trucks to buy from canners on the street, following the migrant miners who follow the city’s recycling schedule night after night.

The owner of one such firm, Conrad Cutler, has his own term for the serious canner.

“We have a Rolodex of ‘bottle professionals’ throughout the five boroughs,” said Mr. Cutler. His company, Galvanize Group, based just north of the city in Mount Vernon, buys about half a million containers a week from Manhattan street canners.

Rosa, who is 36, moved to New York from Ecuador 16 years ago and has two sisters who also worked at the clothing factory, making dresses and shirts. They, too, are now canners.

“Before, it wasn’t like it is now; we had to go to the Bronx to sell the bottles,” Rosa said. “Now trucks come.”

Her regular driver works for a Brooklyn company called Mainstream Recycling. She does not know his name; the contact in her phone simply says “botella” — Spanish for bottle.

No one knows how many people in the city make a living returning deposit containers, but this year an environmental consulting firm, Eunomia, estimated the number at 4,000 to 8,000. And the operators of half a dozen of the city’s 40-odd redemption centers said the ranks of canners were growing.

“Definitely more,” said the owner of Mainstream Recycling, Vladimir Zabrodin. “Much more.”

Ana Martinez de Luco, a nun who runs a huge nonprofit redemption center called Sure We Can in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said the growth showed that even in a strong economy, prospects for people at the bottom of the economic ladder — the rung below minimum wage — were as bleak as ever.

“Really, it’s the harsh time that people have with the living cost of the city,” Ms. Martinez de Luco said. Many canners are retired or on disability and need to stretch their monthly payments. Many are undocumented and drawn to a no-questions-asked job without language barriers.

As stable, low-skill jobs continue to disappear in New York, canning provides a lifeline.

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To understand the streetside redemption business, it is helpful to think of empty cans and bottles as very large coins dappling the sidewalks and gutters of the city. They are there for the taking, but their size — their volume, more than their weight — and relatively low value make them unwieldy. Twenty-five dollars worth of cans weighs about as much as $25 worth of pennies but is much harder to tote around, and the corner bodega is unlikely to accept either as payment for a sack of groceries.

While only a fraction of canners sell to the trucks, within that world there are a dizzying variety of enterprises.

There are canners who sell their cans to bigger canners who sell to the trucks. Others buy their friends’ empties for 3 cents each and sell them to the trucks for 5 cents. One family works the Upper East Side with its own van to safeguard and transport its harvest to the trucks.

At the other end of the island, there is a middle-of-the-night pop-up market under the Manhattan Bridge where dozens of men and women line up to meet the trucks, and a pickup spot on Wall Street where super-canners who have deals with bars to take all their empties can haul off more than $500 a night.

Mr. Cutler’s truckers pay 6 cents per container for a bag of “straights” — that is, all one brand. In the winter, Mr. Zabrodin’s truckers sometimes pay 7 cents per container for a sorted bag, as a thank-you to the canners who supply them year round.

All of this activity occurs in a vast gray area of legality. Technically, once recycling is left on the curb, it belongs to the city. It is a further violation to use a motor vehicle to collect recyclable materials from curbside, but after giving Mr. Cutler’s trucks a hard time for a couple of years, the city has essentially left them alone, too.

The nonenforcement stems from the confounding fact that New York City and New York State run competing recycling programs.

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New York State’s deposit system, established in 1982 to encourage recycling, is surprisingly serpentine but it basically works like this: When a beverage distributor sells a can of soda to a store, it charges an extra 5 cents. The store charges the customer an extra 5 cents. If the customer brings the empty can back, the store returns her deposit and sells the empty back to the distributor for recycling, and collects a 3.5 cent handling fee.

If the customer puts the can out for curbside recycling, though, the city’s system kicks in. The city hauls the can to its recycling contractor, which charges the city a fluctuating fee.

But if a canner takes the can out of the curbside recycling, the city loses it. And that matters to the city, because the fee that the city pays to get rid of its recyclables depends partly on what’s in the mix: the more high-value cans and plastic bottles, the better the deal the city gets.

After the canner sells her cans and bottles to the redemption company, the company sells it to the distributor for a nickel plus the 3.5 cent handling fee. The 3.5 cents fuels the redemption business.

The city, which started mandatory curbside recycling in 1989 under a state order, prefers that New Yorkers donate their deposit containers to the city curbside program, but understands that they might not want to.

“D.S.N.Y. is fine with residents collecting redeemable containers,” a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Sanitation said: “We do not oppose residents who do this to make ends meet.”

State lawmakers and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo have proposed extending the deposit to include other noncarbonated drinks, as well as wine and liquor.

The expansion would cover 1.3 billion containers a year. It would also let New York City’s recycling processor raise its rates.

Which is exactly why the city opposes it.

“The more of that that gets taken away from municipal collection, the more that the city’s property tax owners are going to have to pay for,” the city’s sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, told state lawmakers at a hearing in October.

“We don’t want the glass and all the other crap,” she added. “We want the good stuff, we want the metal and the good plastics.”

The beverage industry, which bears the cost of buying back redeemed containers, also resists the expansion. Even the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote that it would “punch a hole in the economic model of curbside recycling.”

The beverage industry and some lawmakers also contend that there is extensive fraud in the redemption business.

The state’s interest in expanding the deposit law is not purely environmental. For every deposit container that is not redeemed, the state seizes 4 cents of the unclaimed 5-cent deposit. The state already rakes in $100 million a year this way and would make many millions more if the law were expanded.

At Sure We Can, the redemption center in Brooklyn, Ms. Martinez de Luco noted that a nickel is not worth what it was in 1982 (it now takes 13 cents to buy what a nickel bought then).