‘The Bottle Bill Is Just the Beginning’: How Canners Can Make a Cleaner, Better City

Rixaru X, who has worked collecting cans and bottles off city streets for the last six years, spoke to City Limits about the challenges New York City canners face and how the Bigger Better Bottle bill would improve their lives—and the city’s livability. 

When a New Yorker tosses a bottle or can onto the city’s streets, a hidden workforce of nearly 10,000 freelance recyclers, known as canners, is there to pick it up. 

Ever since New York state passed the Bottle Bill in 1982 to encourage recycling, empty beverage containers for soda, beer or sparkling water may be returned to retailers or redemption centers in exchange for a 5 cent deposit.

Making bottles and cans redeemable allows New Yorkers to make a living from recycling. And it’s good for the environment, advocates say, as it keeps trash out of gutters, helping prevent sewage overflows that can lead to flooding, while also directing waste away from landfills.

“I hope and envision that our work can be viewed as part of the greater work done to address the environmental issues and the overall quality of life that we have in the city,” said Rixaru X, a canner and activist from the Bronx.

But Rixaru and his colleagues say the law is outdated: The amount of the refundable deposit needs to increase and the types of drinks covered by the bill need to be expanded. 

The Bigger Better Bottle Bill, currently up for discussion in Albany, would do all that and more. 

The bill, which is seeking a stamp of approval from both houses before the legislative session ends in June, would increase the 5-cent refundable deposit fee to 10 cents. It would also raise the 3.5-cent per container handling fee that beverage retailers pay to redemption centers to 6 cents.

And perhaps most important for canners like Rixaru, it would expand the types and number of beverage containers covered by the law to include all beverages except dairy and 100 percent fruit and vegetable juices. 

Beyond canners, the city as a whole would also reap the benefits, advocates say.

“It’s going to increase recycling rates,” said Sean Basinski, a board member at the non-profit Sure We Can, which fights for the rights of canners across the city.

The state’s environmental agency says the current law already leads to 65 percent of all beverage containers being redeemed and plays a big role in the “conservation of energy and valuable resources.” The new bill seeks to increase that redemption rate to 90 percent, potentially resulting in 5.4 billion more cans and bottles a year kept out of landfills and waterways, according to the environmental research group Reloop.

As the push to get Albany lawmakers to pass the bill by June heats up, City Limits spoke to Rixaru about the work he does, the challenges canners face and why their community is backing the Bigger Better Bottle Bill.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Describe an average day for you while you’re doing this work. 

In a place like New York City, there is so much littering. If I’m going to the doctor’s office, between here and there, I pick up 20 cans. So I didn’t make canning the main purpose of my life, but with all the cans and all the bottles all around the streets, everywhere you go, I started gathering them every time I went outside. Every time I walk to the store, every time I do something, you know, that’s more like how it works.

What issues do you face while getting cans off the street and recycling them?

Even though we are helping the community by getting trash off the streets, when they see people with shopping carts or picking up bottles, they look down on us. 

Another natural limitation of this process is that most dropoff points only take bottles of products that they sell at that store. So rather than just having a database of all the bottles and cans sold in the area, they limit it to that store. And sometimes the machine just acts up.

Then there’s some [bottles] that none of the machines will take. So we want to be able to add all these types of plastic and metals and glass products into the database of accepted cans that currently aren’t accepted.

We also need to increase the amount of money we get for these bottles, because 10 cents per bottle is low. If I spend 30 hours doing this, and I only make $50, you know, it’s not economical. 

What else would you change about this process?

I’ve always had ideas of how this could become a new type of workforce or job description for the city. That would allow us to take on more of a beautification role in neighborhoods and help address some of the environmental issues, like clearing out the clogged-up drains. 

I think the city should see us as a workforce. They could create a system where you could call a canner like you would call an Uber and say, “Hey, can you clean this gutter out? Here’s $3 every time you do this.” We are already out here walking in the neighborhoods. 

They could create an app where we could get called to the closest location where there is some kind of need like that. And it could be a way, at a very low cost, to make a big difference, because we’re kind of like a canvassing workforce out here, all over the place, always walking around. 

It would allow us to get more trash off the streets. [We hope] to get the actual administration to see the value that this would provide in improving the quality of life for the people that reside in the city. 

There’s a clear and present need for [a canner workforce], but nobody could figure out—down with all the bigwigs in City Hall—how to do it, because it’s not really like a capitalist agenda. It’s more of an environmental-social thing, in my opinion.

What about the bottle bill, could it solve some of these problems?

The bottle bill is just the beginning. It opens the door for a whole group of people that have not really had a voice and haven’t felt their voice will be heard. 

It doesn’t end with this bottle bill. We don’t go away and say, yay, we’ve won everything. 

This is the beginning of a conversation about how we could be a more active part about the discourse in our communities related to economics, employment, urban environment, the broader environment that we all live in. It’s about empowering people that are looking for a way to make money and help the community at the same time. 

It would be nice if people saw us as an asset in the community and they saw us as workers. Most people think we’re just bums and mentally disturbed people who can’t make it any other way. And the truth is, I do the community work. I think about these issues, but I’m also in a situation where I need to do this. You know what I mean? 

So if there’s one thing that I would want [it’s] to inspire people to see that it is possible to look at this working community of canners in a new way. I hope and envision that our work can be viewed as part of the greater work done to address the environmental issues and the overall quality of life that we have in the city. 

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