She hunts for cans and bottles, and finds dignity

Clutching to her chest a framed certificate that was just presented to her, Josefa Marín approached the podium to speak as the crowd applauded. It was a sunny Saturday in early March, and Marín had never experienced a day like this one.

A can collector for 30 years, Marín was being introduced as the manager of a newly opened can redemption center in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Being the star attraction at a grand opening ceremony that attracted local politicians and reporters was an overwhelming experience for someone used to laboring in the shadows. 

“We need more space like this, like we are someone,” she told the crowd, speaking in Spanish as her eyes welled with tears. 

Cameras and attention don’t come often for Marín and her peers. The city’s estimated 10,000 independent recyclers, commonly known as “canners,” are nearly invisible to most New Yorkers, though they perform an essential function by collecting millions of aluminum cans, glass bottles and other recyclable items every year.  

They are a marginalized group within a marginalized demographic. The first-ever study on canners in New York City was published in 2023 by Sure We Can, an advocacy group for canners. It found that the city’s canners are mostly members of racial and ethnic minorities, including many older immigrants like Marín, who is 55.

The work they do is humbling, and sometimes even humiliating. Often shunned because of their association with garbage, canners are also sometimes seen as an enemy of municipal recycling programs because they cut into a potential revenue source for cities. Like vendors and other street workers, their most essential needs often go unmet: shade to avoid sun and rain, a bottle of cold water, a restroom to relieve themselves in private. 

Yet the bottles and cans they collect are treasures hidden in plain sight. Under the New York State’s Returnable Container Act, also known as the “Bottle Bill,” canners make 5 cents for every deposit-marked bottle or can they return to a redemption center. The centers, which are mostly mom-and-pop bodegas and other small businesses, get to keep an additional 3.5-cent handling fee for each returned item.  

According to Sure We Can, the Bottle Bill is the reason why nearly 70% of all deposit-marked bottles and cans are returned in New York, pulling unsightly trash off the street and enhancing all of the other environmental benefits of recycling, too. 

Then there are the very tangible, personal benefits for people like Josefa Marín. She worked in a fabric factory when she first arrived from Mexico in the 1990s. Walking to work every day from her Brooklyn apartment, she saw lots of bottles and cans strewn along her route. One day, she also noticed a vending machine that would accept those bottles and cans in return for cash she and her immigrant family could certainly use. 

Canning, she says, changed her life. At the beginning, she would collect around 30 bottles or cans on her walk to and from the fabric factory. That earned her about $1.50-$2 a day — enough to pay for her meals and have a few cents left over, too.  

With her future at the fabric factory looking bleak, Marín decided to take her chance. She used all her savings — $200 — to buy a used car she could use for can collecting as well as to drive her children to school. That was in 2005, and the work transition gave her the flexibility to spend more time with her then-young children.  

She would collect while the kids were in school, but now had the flexibility to stay with them in the afternoons, helping them with homework and spending quality time with them. “There is gold from my day and that comes from time I spent with my children,” Marín says. By then, she was making around $50 a day from collecting.        

The executive director of Sure We Can, Ryan Castalia, remembers that when he first met her in 2017, Marín was one of the highest volume canners he knew. She and her husband Pedro had been helping new canners learn the trade. “Moment to moment, there were challenges,” Castalia says, “but she was able to again rise and rise and rise to the occasion with great results.” 

Still, she often felt discouraged. “Nobody gives us anything, nobody tells us, ‘look, do you feel like going to pee? Here is a central bathroom,’” Marín says. Linking up with Sure We Can gave her a sense of support, stability and respect. As she puts it, “I engage, Sure We Can assists.”  

That is precisely the message Sure We Can is trying to convey with its new recycling center in East New York, near Broadway Junction. The group’s original center is four miles away in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  

“It’s about all these things happening in the same space,” Castalia says. In addition to being a redemption center, the facility also is a community center for the canners, providing a gathering space and even cultural activities. 

It is a place to serve the canners, to recognize the dignity of their work and appreciate their humanity. And Josefa Marín will be running it.

Sure We Can bought the land for the new center in 2023, with help from New York City. For now, it is a simple space, exuding the humbleness and hard work that characterizes the canner population it serves. But Marín sees the possibilities for more, just like she saw the possibilities for change in her own life 30 years ago. 

“This is a project that I had been thinking about because we recyclers need it, because there are not many spaces like this one,” she says. “To start with, maybe it’s not much, but with time, we’re going to improve it.”