Frail and stooped, the man stops in front of each stone staircase, some of which are decorated for Halloween, lifts the lids of the trash cans and plunges his gloved hands into them. He also searches the plastic packaging filled with waste that litter the ground.
“I’m looking for cans to survive“Says the wrinkled-faced little man from the state of Oaxaca in Spanish.”I don’t get help, there is no work, so we have to fight“. His age ? “80 years old“, he replies, before resuming his cart filled with a multicolored pile of cans of soda and beer.
Laurentino does not have an employer. He will exchange his collection at one of the city’s private recycling centers for five cents a can. That is, on a normal day, between 30 and 40 dollars. Something to help him pay the rent, “1.800 dollars“, with her daughter, who works in a laundromat.
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– Five cents a can –
Five cents, this set price has not changed in New York State since a 1982 law, the “Bottle bill“, voted to encourage consumers to recycle.
“It had a really positive impact (…) But we didn’t realize that it would become a crucial source of income for so many families“says Judith Enck, expert in environmental policies and founder of an anti-pollution movement,”Beyond plastics“, who campaigned at the time for this law and today so that the deposit goes to 10 cents.
On its website, the state environmental protection department also praises the “Bottle bill“, which enabled the recycling of”5.5 billion plastic, glass and aluminum containers“for the year 2020 alone, out of 8.6 billion sold, across the country.
In New York, they are thousands, up to 10,000 according to some estimates, to contribute to this effort, by collecting cans – hence the name “canners“- and plastic bottles, without any status or the social protection that comes with a job, to earn meager sums, as only income or in addition to another.
– The elderly –
Men and women, many are elderly, often immigrants, a large proportion of whom come from Latin American countries or China. One of the faces of inequalities in New York, a file on which the Democrat Eric Adams, big favorite to become the new mayor of the city, is expected after the election on November 2.
“It’s hard. There are people who walk for miles and miles“, explains Josefa Marin, a 52-year-old Mexican.”There are places where people do not like their garbage collected. They throw us like little animals and don’t understand that we make a living with it“, she adds.
Most “we help keep the city clean (…) all that plastic would go to the sewers and the sea. We are also doing something for our planet, for our ecology“, claims Josefa, a regular at Sure We Can, a non-profit recycling center, which also serves as a reception center.
Between the mounds of cans and sorted bottles, its director, Ryan Castalia, tells “the diversity“profiles, homeless people, who earn only a few dollars a day,”because they pick up what they find“, of “quasi small entrepreneurs“, working in teams and capable of”process thousands of cans per day“. On average, a”caning“hosted at Sure We Can was earning $ 18 a day before the pandemic.
For everyone, the most acute months of the Covid-19 crisis, in the spring of 2020, were a very hard stop, in particular due to the closure of bars and restaurants.
Difficult to measure, the phenomenon has been going on for years and still attracts candidates, like Alvaro, a 60-year-old Mexican.
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