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.