In New York, Making Ends Meet on a 5-Cent Recycling Deposit

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/nyregion/collecting-cans-collectors-nyc.html

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

97 96 7 years ago

There are two major policy failures on display here. The first is that there isn't enough housing in the city, and they're basically never going to build it. The second is that the city needs to get better waste management technology, instead of just leaving trash out on the streets to feed the rats.

JshWright• 7 years ago

Not sure if your "feed the rats" comment was intended to be cruel, or just careless...

cvs268• 7 years ago

possibly a "no pun intended" moment.

dantillberg• 7 years ago

They likely are referring to feeding actual literal rats. Rats get into trash left out by the street for pickup.

fennecfoxen4• 7 years ago

New York City has the worst rat problem in the world. People referring to rats in NYC are generally referring to actual bona fide rats.

Consider this coverage of rats from the same source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/nyregion/rat-infestation-...

Or this lovely article by the Brooklyn borough president which opens with a story of a rat gnawing on an infant's face, in the slums of Brownsville. The child then grew up with a scar on his lip. (There's probably another policy failure there, too, with regards to public housing, as NYCHA is not good about extermination.) https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-our-war-on-rats-...

Homeless people (a prime bottle-collecting group) are if anything more vulnerable to rats, as they are likely to be sleeping where they are exposed to said rats.

And New York trash policy in much of Manhattan is your building leaves your trash (recyclables and otherwise) out on the sidewalk for pickup, where it is rodent-bait. This needs to change.

hurricanetc• 7 years ago

There is plenty of housing. Normal market dynamics here are totally fucked because of the rent stabilization, rent regulation, and short term rental companies such as Airbnb.

Last I looked nearly half the apartments were in one of those three categories. Rent is fucked because supply is fucked because we fucked it with various programs.

At minimum enforce the short term rental ban.

benatkin3• 7 years ago

The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive.

mc322• 7 years ago

In San Francisco we have these old ladies who rummage though people's bins looking for redeemable containers. Most are "conscientious" enough to put the rest of the recyclables back in without leaving a mess on the sidewalk, but some are less caring and you wake up having to put things back in the bin. On the other hand I believe rubbish companies consider the practice theft and so they campaign against the practice.

benatkin3• 7 years ago

Where I used to live in Emeryville, I would get woken up by someone digging in the trash in the morning. Short of wearing earplugs, which are uncomfortable and not recommended for wearing while sleeping, there was nothing I could do about it. It was infuriating.

At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.

zer00eyz2• 7 years ago

I grew up in Connecticut where we always had redemption value on cans/bottles and so on. The rule was if you sold it you had to take it back. Taking back the cans and bottles was normal for me as a kid, it was how I got change for the vending machines in front of the store.

In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash.

Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.

throwlaplace11• 7 years ago

without people exploiting this incentive

i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?

dtwest2• 7 years ago

Do you think it is good they are digging in the trash? Surely there is a better alternative to this. You may not like the wording but the parent is not wrong.

snissn• 7 years ago

I think this is important. I also don't think having 5 cent recycling deposits make sense anymore where recycling is mandatory in nyc, there's no reason for a financial incentive. There's got to be a better way to create demand for labor for the people resorting to this, also to just provide services to them with tax money, as opposed to this industry that's created around taking already sorted recyclables and re-appropriating them. The whole thing seems really inhumane and it's funded by the existence of the deposit tax.

momokoko• 7 years ago

There is a massive amount of demand for low skilled labor. But due to the US strong dollar policy, that labor will never be available to US residents.

throwlaplace11• 7 years ago

But due to the US strong dollar policy, that labor will never be available to US residents.

that's a very keynesian way to say employers don't want to pay living wages. why are you putting that spin on it?

supernova87a• 7 years ago

Well, I hate to break it to you, but your desire not to see human desperation and to remove the things that make it apparent, does not make it go away.

People do these jobs because there's a market for the items in question, and because they're poor. Taking away a deposit (which helps lubricate the return process of useful materials and gives people a reason to value them) for your conscience sake will not make the poverty go away.

Clearly people do throw away cans and bottles when it's not convenient, and these people who clearly don't have better opportunities in front of them, get some minimal (though unfortunate) employment which they choose to do.

Go work to eliminate poverty. Not the outward indicators of it.

bobthepanda4• 7 years ago

Also, in terms of things that they could be doing, sorting trash is like one of the least bad things they could be doing.

Eliminate that and people would probably switch to something more unsavory and harmful to society.

thereisnospork• 7 years ago

The 5 cent (or more) recycling deposit has always made sense to me as essentially a littering/co-mingling tax. Pay a little at purchase which funds the collection and proper disposal/recycling.

m-p-32• 7 years ago

Agreed, it pushes the purchaser to bring it back and also ensure the materials are triaged properly. If they don't, then someone else can collect the refund.

If it was me I'd put the deposit to 10¢. More people would actually return them, and those who depends on it to make the ends meet wouldn't need to gather as much to make the same amount.

bobthepanda4• 7 years ago

That would also probably be fair given that nickel deposits were mostly decided on decades ago.

The first $.05 bottle deposit law was created in 1972. That would be equivalent to about $.30 today. That would be a much more compelling amount for a modern day citizen to recycle for.

onion2k• 7 years ago

It could be $10 and people renting $13500/month apartments still wouldn't take their cans and bottles back themselves.

bloopernova• 7 years ago

Michigan's deposit is 10 cents per bottle/can. 97% of bottles and cans are recycled, even while Michigan's recycling rate of other materials is pretty low.

Exactly what you described is what happens: If the purchaser doesn't recycle the cans, someone else will. Charities and other people will ask for cans to recycle, and some people will comb through trashcans to get a couple of bucks of empties.

JCharante• 7 years ago

But it's such a small deposit. I'd rather see a $1 or $2 deposit to encourage more people to do their own recycling, to discourage single usage containers, which I think the US's culture would benefit from.

ars• 7 years ago

For $1 I'd be happy to make and ship bottles complete with authentic looking labels to you.

i.e. if it wasn't obvious, that would have way too much fraud.

grecy• 7 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly. It should be a much bigger deposit, and then bottles should be reused rather than recycled (which is the worst of the three things we should be doing).

On Ontario, Canada it's simply a way of life that you bring in a box of empty beer bottles and put them on a rack on your way into the beer store in replacement for the box of full beer you're about to pick up. So in that way you only ever pay the deposit once.

mdasen2• 7 years ago

The article notes that the 5-cent deposit is hampering recycling rather than helping it.

The Natural Resources Defense Council noted that expanding the bottle deposit would "punch a hole in the economic model of curbside recycling." That's because recyclers "want the good stuff, we want the metal and the good plastics."

Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally. Curbside might have an advantage if they can more efficiently collect them (using less fuel and such). In this case, removing valuable recyclables like metal and good plastics from the curbside stream means making curbside recycling less valuable overall. It's transferring money from the city to the individuals collecting the cans.

I'm definitely not faulting the people collecting the cans. They're trying to make ends meet in a city that can be tough. However, for the environment, the bottle deposit doesn't seem to be a tax that helps out recycling - it's a tax that hurts recycling.

If the state expands the bottle deposit to include more bottles, it will remove more high-value recyclables from the curbside recycling stream. Those high-value recyclables subsidize the recycling of less valuable recyclables. That means that we lose the funding for a lot of our recycling.

It's ultimately a poor use of human time to just be moving things around. Rather than entering the curbside stream and getting recycled, people do a lot of more labor so that they...get recycled. The end result is the same, but there's more human labor used, more fuel used, more costs paid, etc. And it makes curbside recycling of other items less economical.

namdnay• 7 years ago

What do you mean by recycling? Melting down the bottles to make “new” glass? That’s extremely energy intensive, compared to just cleaning and refilling, which is what is done to deposit bottles (at least here in Germany)

Symbiote• 7 years ago

Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally.

In Denmark, only the plastic and metal collected by returned deposits is considered clean enough for reuse as food packaging.

Knowing this, I will give my empty bottles to the people roaming the streets rather than put them in the recycling bin. (I rarely have enough for me to think it's worth returning them myself.)

Spooky23• 7 years ago

The redemption rates of deposit bottles are really high — it’s >65% in places like NY and ~80% in Maine, where more categories are returnable.

Deposits drive economic decisions, especially if they go up. If you were paying a $0.25 deposit on a 12-pack of soda, perhaps you’d choose a more efficient larger package.

Curbside recycling is a mess anyway.

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

Just look at historical data with inflation. The $0.05 deposit has been around "forever." When it was created, a nickel was worth much more than it is today.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

Are the deposits applied to the self-serve plastic cups? Also, I believe, the deposit on plastics should be higher than on cans. Recycling or not we should do more to discourage the use of plastics.

fortran773• 7 years ago

These people profiled aren't collecting litter. They're diverting an already well sorted and collected stream that should have gone to the City and stealing the revenue for themselves.

mrcactu5• 7 years ago

Everybody drinks soda misses the garbage can, so these people are making the bottle and can recycling market more efficient.

deith• 7 years ago

Why don't they take a mail truck on Mother's day, fill it with bottles and bring it to Michigan? I heard it's 10 cents there.

tsjq• 7 years ago

There was a recent podcast episode on a related event :

"Episode 925: A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle : Planet Money : NPR"

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...

fortran773• 7 years ago

I have a great deal of sympathy for these people and it's a shame that the way zoning works it's difficult for there to be enough cheap housing built where people need it.

However, I have some questions for the NY Times:

1. What does the fact that there are people paying $13,000/month rent have anything to do with the people collecting cans?

2. They're stealing from the City, as you point out. Why isn't this wrong?

3. How much tax-free money are they earning? Combined with the benefits they're receiving from Federal Government, City, and State with this untaxed revenue stream, what's their income? How much would a person who pays taxes have to earn to net the same amount?

ipnon• 7 years ago

The article quotes the commissioner of the sanitation department saying that collecting cans is decriminalized.

fortran773• 7 years ago

There's a difference between "decriminalized" and "legal". Certainly we shouldn't fill jail cells with recycling thieves, but we shouldn't deify them either.

And their income tax theft isn't legal or decriminalized.

whorleater• 7 years ago

This is an extraordinary comment, especially in how ghoulish it is. It makes a head fake towards the "welfare queens" myth, ignores the fact that collection is decriminalized and calls it "stealing", and best of all, the commenter makes the off handed implication that this story is emotional manipulation.

I wonder if HN really thinks journalism should have the writing of an API documentation.

gbronner2• 7 years ago

An undocumented but well known side effect of the combination of curbside recycling and bottle deposits is that once the cans and bottles are placed outdoors, homeless people cut the bags open to fish out the deposit containers.

This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.

antiterra• 7 years ago

Its a straightforward side effect to avoid as well, don’t use bags. Austin and Chicago come to mind as cities that don't accept bagged items for recycling. Neither has bottle deposit but I don’t see it being a huge issue to add, if they so chose.

myself248• 7 years ago

For this to happen, a couple things have to be in place:

1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit.

2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts.

I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress!

However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess.

(And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock-salt...)

gbronner2• 7 years ago

In response to #1, Manhattan real estate costs over $1k per square foot, often more. Adding a third container/bag to everyone's trash area would eat up far more capital in real estate than it would produce in income.

#2: Manhattan is super dense, and there's no place to put that many bins. Bags scale better than bins anyway, and a lot of buildings use trash compactors which work far better with bags. Finally, there's not enough room between parked cars to get bins from the sidewalk to the street easily.

altec3• 7 years ago

I'm in Oregon and our deposit is 10¢ as well, we also have the big bins/carts. The homeless around here will pull everything out of our recycling bin a lot of the time to find cans. Most of the time they'll put it all back, but sometimes they wont, and I'll find my trash/recycling littered about the street.

It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.

forgotmypw• 7 years ago

Fun fact: Poland Spring bottles can be returned for a 5-cent deposit, unless they have a thin red line on the label, in which case they are worthless to deposit collectors, and just end up in the trash. (The red line is an indicator that the bottle came from a 24-pack.)

In New York, Making Ends Meet on a 5-Cent Recycling Deposit

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