A Revolution Is Taking Place, One Can At A Time
By Ali Smith | March 3, 2022 | Village Voice
What do you see when the temperature is 23 degrees and you pass a small woman folded into the shape of a question mark digging through the trash on a street corner. She’s maybe around 70, and she doesn’t look unhappy, just matter-of-fact, as she goes about her business of adding bottles and cans to two enormous plastic bags balanced on top of a shopping cart with one wonky wheel.
Even just a month ago, I might have assumed she was an outsider, desperate. But knowing what I do now, I see her for what she is: part of a revolution.
WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) estimates that there are 8,000 to 10,000 “canners”—waste pickers who collect containers and redeem them for money—working on New York City’s streets. Of the 900 served regularly at Sure We Can, New York’s only nonprofit bottle and can redemption center, the same study reports that 55% are Latinx, 24% are Black, and 18% are Asian. A third are over 60, and 80% live below the poverty line.
But those are stats. Who are these people?
When I visit Sure We Can, Pedro Romero is climbing down from the storage locker he shares with his wife, Josefa Marín. He smiles at me and looks positively Lilliputian under the enormity of the bags he carries, but he handles his burdens with ease before depositing them in front of Josefa. Her eyes are dark and lively and she smiles so much as I try to be understood in my halted, broken Spanish that I can’t help but wonder if she’s laughing at me—until I realize how effortlessly she laughs with everyone around her. The two chat and toss bottles and cans across each other into bags, separating them by distributor: Union Beer, PepsiCo, Manhattan Beer.… It’s the end of a long weekend of hard work, and it will now take them around nine hours to sort their haul. They will make 5 cents a container, plus 1 to 1.25 cents more from Sure We Can for sorting them.
Another canner, Lastenia Quizhpi, is polite but reserved. Her daughter, Jessica, 19, studies operations management and analytics at Baruch College; the part of her tuition that is not covered by financial aid is paid for by her mother’s canning. Jessica collected with her mother until she was 12, when a neighbor reported them to Child Protective Services. Although she doesn’t do it full-time, when Jessica sees an opportunity to collect containers now, it’s hard to resist. “It’s like when I see a penny on the floor, I pick it up even though it isn’t worth much. It was embarrassing when I was a child, not now.”
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