Don’t waste time with Heineken. It’s one of the first lessons hard-core canners learn. The green glass bottles are difficult to redeem at the city’s recycling centers, in part because stores are only required to take back the brands they sell, and also because the glass is always more problematic to feed into the recycling machines. That said, many savvy canners don’t deal in glass at all. It’s heavier than plastic or aluminum.
Another tip: Don’t bother with two-liter bottles. They take up as much space as half a dozen cans and are still only worth 5 cents.
Collecting cans and bottles for the deposit — known as canning — has long been a staple of the New York streets, but for most of us, it’s a bit of a mystery.
The new documentary “Redemption” aims to shed light on the people who make their living off others’ trash. The film may take home an Oscar in the process. Currently playing at the IFC Center, it’s up for Best Documentary Short.
New York-based directors Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, who were pitched the idea by an HBO executive, say that the number of people collecting cans has seemingly doubled in the two years since they began working on the movie.
“We work out of the Downtown Community TV Center in Chinatown. All of our adjacent buildings used to be filled with garment factories,” Alpert says. “Every single one of these factories is gone. You don’t hear sewing machines anymore. You hear clank, clank, clank of people going through the garbage. We stopped making things in New York, and all the people who used to make things have to survive.”
“Redemption” follows a handful of canners, most poor and unskilled, including a Central American immigrant, a Chinese woman who shares a one-bedroom apartment with six others and a former Queens factory worker.
Nuve is a Central American immigrant who packs her two kids off to school before hitting the streets — sometimes with her sister — to collect cans.
One couple from Guatemala spends the summer canning here, then returns home in winter to farm corn. “Something has happened here in America when a peasant in Guatemala realizes that his life is better on a mountain top in Central America than in central Brooklyn,” Alpert says.
Susan, a 65-year-old retired technology salesperson, began canning a few years ago when her Social Security checks no longer covered her bills. “I made between $20 and $40 on a very good day canning,” says Susan, who withheld her last name. “It’s hard work. You’re on your feet all the time. You have to constantly be bending. It can be dirty. You have to push a cart or carry the cans on your back with a stick.”
To make that much, Susan worked four to eight hours a day, collecting more than 800 cans to make $40, since the redemption machines reject some of her finds.
That’s when she could find a working machine, since they stop taking deposits once they’re full. Canners usually must wait in line, sometimes for hours, to redeem their finds.
Susan says the key to a successful canning day is bulk.
“You have to set up relationships with the superintendents and the porters of the high-rise building,” she says. “There’s a schedule of when each block and section have to put out their recyclables. I don’t spend time walking around the streets.”
On Mondays, Susan would hit a high-rise on East 25th Street that consistently put out between 14 and 16 barrels filled with bottles and cans at 4 p.m. Even though a relationship with a super marks a building as “yours,” competition can get heated on the sidewalk. Another canner once swung at Susan with a stick.
Susan recently abandoned the canning life and moved to Atlantic City, where her fixed income is enough to live on.
And come Oscar night, Alpert and O’Neill will no doubt feel as marginalized as the subjects in their film. Nominees for the Best Documentary Short category don’t exactly get seats next to George Clooney.
“We’re going to be in the back and able to hear the toilets flushing,” O’Neill jokes.