On a Saturday afternoon in early November, about 30 people are watching a documentary inside a shack in the heart of Bushwick, a post-industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn. They are all canners – people who make a living redeeming empty cans and bottles, five cents apiece. Although they all got up before the sun and have worked in the cold for hours, no one looks like they’re about to fall asleep. All eyes on the screen. The short film, streamed from YouTube and projected on a white sheet, is about a workers’ cooperative in Argentina.

The screening was organized by Ana Martínez de Luco, a Catholic nun who says she prefers to work “under the sun, not the Vatican”, and calls herself a street nun.

As the documentary finishes, she addresses the audience: “Do you now have a better idea of what a cooperative is?” People nod. “You’ve got to organize, we risk being kicked out soon, it looks like there’s no room for us,” she says in a tone of voice that barely disguises her anger.

Sure We Can, the redemption center Martínez de Luco co-founded more than a decade ago, must move somewhere else for the fifth time. Their lease in Bushwick – for which they currently pay $5,302 a month – expires at the end of February and the owner wants to sell the lot. According to Martínez de Luco, the asking price is $3m. “That’s the equivalent of 60m cans,” she jokes.

Roughly 11m pieces were redeemed at Sure We Can in 2018, brought here in shopping carts by hundreds of canners – more than 500, according to the center’s data. Surrounded by industrial buildings turned into lofts, Sure We Can is a 12,000 sq ft outpost of poverty in one of Brooklyn’s hippest neighborhoods. The workers’ voices make up a cacophony of diversity: Spanish predominates, but you can also hear English and Chinese. Every once in a while out pops a word or two in Polish. Or the cluck of a chicken.

“This here’s my second home,” says a 74-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic who’s known in the community as Morena. Next to her, an elderly woman from Beijing is moving her hips to the sound of Latin music.

Ana Martínez de Luco, a ‘street nun’ who founded Sure We Can in 2007. Photograph: Alfredo Chiarappa/The Guardian

If it’s still true that “New York is a city for only the very rich or the very poor”, as Joan Didion wrote in a landmark essay in 1967, Sure We Can is the latter’s Noah’s Ark. On board are not only people who are homeless or struggling with addictions, but also retired immigrants, people who lost their job due to an injury, single mothers who can as a second job and young people who have no money and no better opportunities.

At Sure We Can, a hardworking Mexican couple makes together nearly $40,000 a year canning, while other people – those with physical problems or other impediments – make no more than a few hundred a month.

Thanks to a state deposit law enacted in 1982 known as the Bottle Bill, for these people the streets of New York are treasure troves. A report on the outcomes carried out by the consulting firm Eunomia, not yet released, reveals that there are somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 people making their living picking up cans and bottles in New York City. Martínez de Luco believes that there are about 10,000 and that the number is growing.

A decisive moment in the increase in the number of canners was when the economic crisis of 2009 coincided with a significant expansion of the Bottle Bill that included water bottles.

A lifeline for vulnerable New Yorkers

Pierre, 64, a musician with the passion for boxing. He began canning about 10 years ago after quitting his job in a school of music and suffering depression. Photograph: Alfredo Chiarappa/The Guardian

A man from the Virgin Islands – a former carpenter who now walks with a cane following a knee injury – began canning after losing his apartment in the 2008 mortgage crisis. He spends his days keeping Highland Park, in east Brooklyn, clean. “Park rangers consider me almost as their colleague,” he says with a smile. Another man, a musician from the Bronx in his late 50s, took up canning after losing his job in a music school. “I’m free now. And I can make as much money as I want,” he says, adding that canning saved him from depression.

For hundreds of people Sure We Can is a de facto community center. Canners can spend hours there, sorting cans and bottles and taking a percentage of the 3.5 cent handling fee that’s usually kept entirely by redemption centers. Trays of food are available almost every day, often leftovers from school cafeterias. During the coldest days of the year, those who are homeless and don’t have a place to stay can seek shelter in the heated containers. When possible, birthdays are celebrated with cakes and (full) bottles of soda.

“I’m not waiting for a miracle, I’m ready to fight for us to stay,” says Martínez de Luco, who was born in the Basque country 64 years ago. Her struggle may sound like just one more attempt to resist gentrification, but it’s something more than that.

Over the last couple of months, Martínez de Luco has had two meetings that raised her hopes. The first was with a New York city council member, Antonio Reynoso, to ask for his support. A few weeks later representatives of the department of sanitation met with her in her office. One of the reasons why they were interested in Sure We Can is that, unlike other redemption centers, it has put together an accurate database on canning activity. Not only do they keep a record of every single transaction, they also take note of qualitative information on the community.

Martínez de Luco says that during these encounters they discussed the possibility of finding financial support that would allow Sure We Can to make a down payment on the purchase of the lot. But the initial enthusiasm for the idea was soon dampened by the affirmation – according to Martínez de Luco and her collaborators who were present at the meetings – that the city cannot support the community of canners because they make them “lose money”. (Neither DSNY nor Reynoso replied to a request for clarification or comments. DSNY simply insisted that their “ultimate goal is to send zero waste to landfills”.)

It is Tom Outerbridge, the general manager of Sims Municipal Recycling, a division of the multinational Sims, who clarifies the meaning of that statement. In 2008 the company signed a 20-year contract (including the possibility of two 10-year extensions) with the DSNY for the processing and marketing of recyclables collected by the city trucks.

In the course of a telephone interview, Outerbridge explained the conflict of interest. According to their contract with the city, which he himself calls “complex”, Sims pays in order to receive roughly 60% of the paper to be recycled, while it is instead paid to take care of 100% of the metal, glass and plastic for a total of nearly 500,000 tons of curbside materials annually. Nevertheless, as Outerbridge explains, most of their revenue does not come from what the city pays them but rather from the sale of these recyclables to third parties. Aluminum has the strongest market value, while glass is close to negative owing to its high processing cost. The contract contains provisions that enable revenue sharing between Sims and the city, but it also provides for “adjustments” should the city not manage to collect enough valuable material like cans and plastic bottles. In this case, the city must pay additional amounts.

Bottles at Sure We Can. Photograph: Alfredo Chiarappa/The Guardian

“If you put a deposit on containers you incentivize scavengers to take them out of the city’s recycling system,” says Outerbridge, referring to canners with the same term used in 2012 in a video released by DSNY entitled Stealing Recycling’s Future.

Outerbridge’s argument implies that the canners don’t limit themselves to picking up cans and bottles left on the street or in garbage bins. He’s right. While the great majority of canners collect any returnable container they find in their path and help keep streets clean, some have implemented other strategies that allow them to have a more stable income. Some wait outside restaurants and bars (these are not included in the city’s recycling program) often because they know someone who works in the kitchen. Others have informal agreements with superintendents of buildings so that they can go into the basements to sort the residents’ waste. However, they don’t simply pick up bottles and cans from clear bags full of recyclables. They sort everything, saving thousands of containers from black bags of general trash.

Outerbridge is particularly concerned about a recent proposal to expand the Bottle Bill to make most non-alcoholic beverage containers eligible for five-cent redemption. For his company this represents a threat, but for New York state it’s the next chapter of a success story. The Bottle Bill has in fact helped reduce roadside litter by 70% and, no less important, it is a source of revenue. In fact 80% of the value of unredeemed items goes to the state, while beverage companies are allowed to retain 20%. As a result, the state has brought in $884m in revenue over the past 10 years.

A tremendous public service

Thirty-seven years ago, when the Bottle Bill went into effect, no one expected that it would have a significant social as well as environmental impact.

“We used to say that children would pick up cans and bottles to supplement their allowance. Very unrealistic!” says Judith Enck, who worked to pass New York state’s first bottle legislation. During the Obama administration, Enck was appointed as regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. She’s currently a visiting professor at Bennington College and the founder of Beyond Plastics.

“At that time we were under the Reagan administration that hit poor people very hard,” she recalls. “Suddenly littered bottles and cans became a major source of revenue for people. And that was mostly in New York City but in upstate cities as well,” Enck says that in the beginning redeemers – this is what she calls canners – were very welcome, because there was no mandatory recycling. “They were doing a tremendous public service.”

Bottles at Sure We Can. Photograph: Alfredo Chiarappa/The Guardian

But even now, according to Enck, canners are fundamental to the success of the city’s recycling program and the goal set by the current administration to send zero waste to landfill by 2030. Despite being a great supporter of the Bottle Bill, during the seven years she lived in New York City she found returning cans and bottles “virtually impossible”. Machines outside supermarkets were often broken or clogged.

This is why canners go to redemption centers. In New York there are currently about 40 of them, none in Manhattan. When in 2007 Martínez de Luco founded Sure We Can with Eugene Gadsden, a homeless man from North Carolina, they were both living on the streets on Manhattan’s west side, facing the struggle of redeeming the cans and bottles they were collecting. After the closing of a historical redemption center called We Can in 2005, located on 52nd street, they were “lost”, says Martínez de Luco. “We needed a new place and so we opened one,” she recalls, adding that she managed to find $15,000 in donations to kick off. They were “pushed to the other side of the river”, to use her words, two years later.

For Martínez de Luco, redemption centers should be physical places where “people who are struggling to survive in this city can find support and see their work dignified”.

“You can see it as a combination of a waste management practice and a social service,” says Steven Cohen, the director of the Earth Institute’s research program on sustainability policy and management at Columbia. “Canners are not people begging for money, but industrious people,” he says. Cohen believes not-for-profit organizations such as Sure We Can should be supported by the city because “increasing employment opportunities for people like that would reduce homelessness and costs for the city”, which is one of the toughest challenges faced by the current administration. According to the Eunomia report, the Bottle Bill has created more than 5,000 jobs, excluding canners, in the state of New York.

Martínez de Luco’s dream is that her canner community manages to organize a cooperative operating in partnership with the city. In the Argentinian capital, the recycling system is based on 12 cooperatives of cartoneros, 5,500 people who receive the equivalent of about $300 a month from the city to collect recyclable materials.

In the city of New York, where a complex recycling apparatus has been in place for decades, this would be impossible. But Martínez de Luco believes that the reasons are not only practical in nature. “Have you ever heard the word aporophobia?” she asks. “It’s the fear of people who live in poverty.”

Francesca Berardi worked on a year-long reporting project on NYC canners with a grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation (canners.nyc.)