The Big Roundtable

by Robert W. Fieseler, thebigroundtable.com

June 9

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You drink your beer; you toss the container. Do you know it comes back? How economics and design, laws and lobbying, craft and
ingenuity, recycling theory and recycling myth, the nature of aluminum and the nature of capitalism, and grueling, endless, human
labor all shape the cans strange and eternal circle of life.

Chapters 12345
1. Aluminum Forever

If aliens land in 200,000 years to perform an archeological autopsy of the human species, they will find concrete foundations, Mount
Rushmore, and billions of curious metallic lumps.
Eternity lived three floors below my apartment window. You could hear it in garbage lids lifting and in laundry carts clinking down
my street like sad music boxes. Between the chime of the bottles youd hear the crinkle of beverage cans, those echoes of ancient
aluminum, those barrel-shaped objects salvaged by the poor for a reason. They were sounds that signaled money for people who knew
to listen, though not for the hipsters of East Williamsburg and certainly not for me. My entire life Id taken the aluminum can at face
value. I would take it in my hand, cold, and press it to my face, and I was kissing an object that would outlive me. When you consider
the can, it opens not to sweetness and experience but to the limits of human achievement.

These were the noises of people at work: the scraping of metal on metal, fights in other languages, grunts of people stacking a heavy
bag onto a cart filled with thousands of other hand-picked cans. Peering down three stories, I watched them mining in the sun. They
wore wide-brimmed hats and yellow dishwashing gloves. Who was the boss of them? Who wanted what they found? Day after day,
they dove their hands into my buildings trash, mostly invisible. I had to train myself to see them, since (for the most part) poor is not
the story in North Brooklyn. In this, the land of single-batch whiskeys and crane-assembled condos, were home to four of the nations
top twenty-five fastest gentrifying zip codes.
One of these workers was a neighbor I knew named Fabian Puma. I knew her first name because my superintendent spoke it loudly
whenever she showed up every Thursday to forage through our clear blue bags. I learned her last name because I asked. Fabian lived
just down Powers Street on the route where I walked my terrier to Cooper Dog Park. Wednesday nights, her garbage would carve out
the street in front of her first-story apartment. You gotta fortress out here! I heard a man in a business suit stop and say. Fabian, a
fifty-two-year-old mother of three, would feign surprise at the containers and smile at this, the occasional onlooker. Standing five feet
tall, with a baby-doll face, she looked innocent in her work. She playfully wiped her hands on her flower-print apron, which she wore
like a uniform. This spectator, after all, was part of her benefactor classemitting the stream of cans that flows across Williamsburg,
from which she cobbles together her familys rent. An Ecuadorian immigrant, Fabian speaks no English and assumes that a mutual
laugh will smooth things over. She giggled with the man, who shook his head and continued on towards Bushwick Avenue.
Surrounding her were sixty-one boxes of empty bottles and fifty-two ten-gallon bags, each filled with more than 200 empty cans.
Fabians work has multiple names. Williamsburg hipsters call them the bottle people. Fabian calls herself a canner, while many
longtime practitioners prefer the term ecological engineer. Like thousands of members of the working poor and immigrant
communities across New York City, Fabian gathers recyclable cans to redeem their cash deposits en masseone nickel per one
container.
Back to work, she straightened her plain blue cap and re-tied the band on her ponytail. She dove her hands into mountains of glass
and aluminum. On the back of each can she grazed was a block of text. Its message read:

ME-MA-VT-CT-MA-NY-IA-OR-5
MI-HI 10 CA CRV.
NY was a bottle deposit state.
She moved with mesmerizing rhythm, seizing one silvery can and stowing it a moment later. There was method to these movements.
Contrasting brands in the trash bags left out on garbage day made their way to clear recycling bags, sorted according to their nature.
SixPoint tallboy cans went with Bronx Brewery tallboy cans, as both were the dispersed by Union Beer Distributors, the largest
distributor of craft beers in New York City. Bud Light went in the big bag with Budweiser. Side by side, these two major brands
represented the number one and the number three best-selling beers in Americaboth brewed by Anheuser-Busch InBev and,
likewise, distributed to Brooklyn retailers by Union Beer.
As dusk approached, cracks of light between the tenement buildings caught the occasional can as she held it. Even drained and empty
they shimmered. Whered you find all these? I asked in Spanish. McCarren Park, she answered. Shed fished these treasures from
outside the hundreds of bars and brunch eateries near the heart-shaped park in the center of Williamsburg. Gentrified Brooklyn
drinks a lot of beer, which is good for canners like Fabian. As the white population of Williamsburgs own Community District 1
increased more than 12 percent between 2000 and 2009, binge-drinking habits also expandedrising from 16.7 percent to 19.4
percent of all residents, according to the 2012 Brooklyn Neighborhood Report. Almost one in five locals on a typical night on Bedford
Avenue or McGuiness Boulevard consumed five or more alcoholic drinks, which represented the highest reported levels of binge
drinking in Brooklyn.
Such demand draws eager suppliers and eager scavengers. Distributors like Chris Sheehan, the general manager of Union Beer, calls
New York City the worlds largest beer market. His warehouses pump half a million cases of beer into the city every thirty days. After
all, New York City is not just a metropolis but also the largest tourist destination in the U.S. With a resident population of 8.3 million,
the city welcomed an additional 54.3 million visitors in 2013. Eleven million of those visitors came from abroad, people who
altogether shelled out the highest overnight spend of any destination city in the world: $18.6 billion, according to MasterCard
Worldwide.
Grabbing a lipstick-red Coca-Cola container and squinting at the logo, Fabian paused to consider the can for a moment.

All photographs by Anna Hiatt

The aluminum beverage can is a marvel of industrial design. Everything about it is designed to please you. Its easy to stack, satisfying
to open, easy to grip with your thumb and forefinger, convenient to purchase in quantity. The can never rusts, due to the non-ferrous
properties of aluminum, and its byproduct from exposure to air is a protective layer. The can is easy to crush when empty and nearly
impossible to crush when sealed. Its cylinder will withstand up to ninety pounds of direct pressure. Four six-packs of beer can support
a two-ton car. With its perfect seal and imperviousness to light, the can will shelter its contents from sun and airtwo enemies that
rapidly break apart the enzymes in hops and sugar. More recently, the perfection of a polymer lining inside the can has eliminated the
metallic aftertaste that once plagued canned beer. The act of pouring through its wide mouth aerates the beer and improves its flavor.
These innovations have made believers out of flavor-conscious brewers like Two Brothers and New Belgium, whove become confident
that the can is as effective as the bottle for stowing their precious cargo.
As of April 2014, 406 craft breweries offered their beer in a can. In 2011, a craft newcomer, The Bronx Brewery, decided to go
exclusively with a sixteen-ounce tallboy to provide a point of differentiation on crowded shelves. Were a young, urban brewery,
and this just fits our brand, says Damian Brown, founder and brewmaster. You can take it to the beach, sporting events, a lot of
places glass cant travel, and we wanted the beer to be sort of ubiquitous. You know, New York Citys pale ale. Sierra Nevada
premiered their signature Pale Ale in a can in 2012. The Boston Beer Co., the nations largest independent brewery with 1.3 percent of
the U.S. beer market, spent a million dollars to design a can with a flared lip for its Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Due to a practice of
continuous design improvement called lightweighting, the aluminum can also weighs less and less with each passing year. The first
RC Cola cans in 1964 weighed about three ounces. Crushing one represented a display of strength. Using more complex alloys, todays
cans weigh about half an ounce. Small children can crumple them. Most of the weight in your hand, in fact, comes from the liquid.
This lighter, stronger object will travel across the country more cost-effectively than its bulkier glass cousin. A fifty-three-foot trailer
truck will hold about 1,000 cases of bottles or 2,000 cases of cans. By those estimates, cans offer the chance for 100 percent more
product per shipment. This differential is especially significant for west coast breweries like Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., who ship
their product almost 3,000 miles from Chico, California to New York.
The twelve-ounce can is also perhaps the most powerful branding device in the world. Each four and three-quarter-inch cylinder
contains half a square foot of billboard space. The can is a canvas for 96.6 billion roving advertisements in the U.S.; thats just the
number of new cans we ship annually. One cultural figure, Beyonc, became godlike in 2013 when she put her image on a Pepsi can as
part of a pre-album marketing push. Each can makesand deliversan emotional appeal with vivid colors, fonts, and graphics.
Perhaps thats why, as the historians Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont observe, for Americans, packaging is an almost
mystical concept. Cans cram a variety of messages, both conscious and subliminal. The red bowtie Budweiser can, which hit the
shelves in 2011, devotes forty-six words in a seldom-read arc of type, which many consumers take to be a decorative graphic. This is
the famous Budweiser beer, the text begins, the start of a brand creed. Countless marketing studies have proven that consumers can
picture their favorite soda or beer can in their minds. Play the game now: Sprite, Fanta Orange, Coors Light. This visual information
has been encoded into our collective imaginations. Perhaps thats why Coca-Cola executive Ivan Pollard once described the packaging
as the most enduring symbol of our brand promise.
The experience of consuming from a can is so personal and sensual that its easy to forget how the container continues to exist once it
is used. Its as if the can exists not to worry you. It leverages the same single-serving psychology as countless other disposable items
popularized by 60s over-the-counter culturethe sugar packet, the paper plate, the TV dinner: one person, one delivery device, one
kiss of flavor at a time.
As if waking from a reverie, Fabian shook her head and stowed the can back in a bag. Much like her surname, Puma, the apex hunter
venerated as a sacred animal in her home nation of Ecuador, Fabian rose before dawn this morning, and shed be up again tomorrow
with the light. Sleep would be sparse in the months of long days, when raw resources were there for the taking. For these were the
nights and weekends when people drank at outdoor festivals and in backyards. This was canning season. She and her husband,
Manuel, would leave with two shopping carts to make the mile-long walk to McCarren Park. Theyd pounce on troves of metal or, as
they thought of them, nickels, that grow outside the watering holes of the wealthy and young. The work would be physically taxing
and require strategy, much too demanding for someone half-committed to the task. Theyd obey the canner code: first to the pile, first
to that and every other pile on your side of the block; dont claim it if you cant handle it, cant carry it, cant squeeze it in your cart and
heave it back home. Im a hard worker, but I give them credit, says my apartment superintendent, Michael Super Mike Serrano,
whos observed the Pumas at work for the past four years. They walk miles picking up the cans. There would be competition, too, in
the form of other canners, hundreds of them. You have to learn which spots, which days, which times and what is the system, says
Sister Ana Martinez De Luco, fifty-nine, a Roman Catholic nun who earned her canning credentials on the streets of New York.
At dusk, the Pumas would drag their heavy cache home past the swollen-faced winos on park benches. So many Williamsburg

residents seemed to mix up New Yorks homeless for people like her canning familypeople with apartments and Facebook pages. Its
a common misconception. In 2002, when Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mogul turned New York mayor, proposed doing away
with the nickel deposit on cans, he quipped, If were going to help the homeless, there are better ways than having them go through
our garbage. In late afternoon, for Fabian, the sorting would begin, hours of it. Sometimes, she said in Spanish as she wiped her
hands together, I dream about cans.
These cans haunt Fabian because theyre endlessly recyclable and, thus, incredibly valuable to entities bigger than herself. Infinitely
recyclablethats what it boasts on the side of Dales Pale Ale, the first craft beer to go with the can in 2003. Like so few things in this
world, aluminum can be recreated from itself. Yes: an old can, with a minor infusion of alloys, can melt down and make a new one.
According to Aluminum Association figures, 68 percent of the cans we hold today are made of recycled metal. As an elemental
material, sitting on the third row of the periodic table, aluminum cannot decompose into smaller parts. Each can thus faces two paths
in its lifespan: to continue on indefinitely in its present form or be reincarnated, regenerated brand new, like Dr. Who, at any period
in its existence. If aliens land in 200,000 years to perform an archeological autopsy of the human species, they will find concrete
foundations, Mount Rushmore, and billions of curious metallic lumps. Aluminum is highly mixable and malleable, and perhaps thats
why we rest so many aspects of our society upon this material. Aluminum alloys make jetliners, skyscrapers, antiperspirants, Apple
computers, and tiny cans that feed our consumer patterns. Into these alloys, old cheap aluminum fished by canners like Fabian is just
as effective as the expensive new stuff mined from equatorial nations like Venezuela, Guinea, and India. Through a complex system of
vertical integration and market incentivesinvolving governments, scavengers, and the largest corporationsthe beverage can shines
again and again.
2. Resurrection and Redemption
Disconnected from all overtures to fuzzy animals and environmentalism, recycling, in practice, is an industrial process. When all
the gears are synchronized in the loop, a consumer can release her grip on an old can and tighten her grip on a brand new can
within sixty dayssixty days for can-to-can resurrection in the retail space.
Fabian, Manuel, and their sons have a Saturday morning ritual. Fabian, the linchpin of the clan, tends to be the first out of bed. She
showers, tiptoes through the boys room (by virtue of the apartments railroad layout) and makes breakfast. Their sonsMichael,
fifteen, and Lagarto, thirtyplop down at the table. Devout Catholics, they say grace before shoveling food. Then, it is time for the car
ride. They rise and grab the stray bags from the courtyard, which Fabian transformed into an aluminum holding pen the evening
before. On the street, they pile into a Chevy minivan as if headed for soccer practice.

Their aluminum-body, Chevy Astro Mark III conversion van is a popular set of wheels among canners. Last manufactured in 2005,
this vehicle boasts five-foot ceilings, a median price point of $5,000, and minimal showinessall key attributes for canning.
Originally designed for family vacations, the Mark III also offers space for an entertainment center and accent lighting on its vaulted
roof. My upper-middle-class parents bought a Mark III for $30,000 in 1996, and the vehicle stood so tall that it would scrape the top

of our two-car garage. As an ode to its tank-like appearance, my father nicknamed the Mark III his Suburban Assault Vehicle.
Fabian and family purchased a used Mark III in 2009 at a time when canning was their sole source of income, converting this people
mover into an industrial machine. As with any material purchasefrom a sandwich to rentthe Pumas considered the value of any
item in canner terms, translated into five-cent increments. The resulting tabulation was just more practical: twenty cans for a $1
coffee, 160 cans for a Big Mac combo meal, 1,400 for a pair of Levis 501 jeans at Kohls. The purchase of a Mark III, hence, would
represent a logistical feat: $5,000 cash meant 100,000 nickels from 100,000 returned cans.
Stacks of bags cram against Michaels and Lagartos legs as they take seats in the middle row. Nooks in the ceiling sit empty, where, in
my fathers van, a miniature TV/VCR would blare family films like Father of the Bride and Sister Act. Teetering in the trunk are
columns of boxes loaded floor to ceilingeach layer of the cake filled with twenty-four empty glass bottles. Sharing the passenger
space, aluminum cans crinkle and flex in the summer heat. They emit a stale, alcoholic vapor. Big ceiling, says Manuel. Enough to
fit $150. On a great week, these interiors could become so overstuffed that his sons would follow behind in a used sedan.
The Pumas take the same route each time: a six-minute drive without traffic. Starting from Powers Street in East Williamsburg, then
left on Bushwick Avenue. Left on Grand Street. Right on Varick Avenue. Right on Flushing Avenue, where they pull into the line of
vehicles waiting before Blue Star Beverages. Blue Star is one of New Yorks many redemption centers, private businesses exclusively
dedicated to redeeming the five-cent deposit on each container. Redemption is the term that the State of New York has assigned to
the act of handing back a can and receiving a nickel. The transaction itself, the behavior of redeeming, feels devoid of the poetry we
associate with the word. Redemption centers sell no products; they make no products; they simply pay to acquire the skeletons of old
productsand not just any product but beverage containers, specifically the ones with NY $.05 on the back. Blue Star accepts most
aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic water bottles, but confusing exceptions remain: no tea bottles, no tea cans, no energy drinks,
no hard cider. A twenty-four-ounce can of Monster Energy Drink is worthless, but an eight-point-four-ounce cylinder of Red Bull
gives you five cents. A plastic bottle of Poland Spring pays a nickel, but a plastic Vitamin Water will be turned away. Such are the
intricacies of Bottle Deposit law in New York State, which the Pumas have learned to navigate with ease.
Redemption centers like Blue Star represent an unplanned kink in the three-tiered system of alcohol distribution invented in euphoria
of FDRs election and the 1933 end of Prohibition. To divest the alcohol industry of organized crime syndicates, whod streamlined the
art of bootlegging from distilleries to corner stores, states forbade any alcohol producer from also being a distributor and any
distributor from also being a retailer. The vertical integration that had dominated Prohibition (and made legends out of Al Capone
and Joseph Kennedy) vanished, and tax collection, which enabled the tracking of product from A to B, began in earnest. Everybody
gets a piece: The federal government takes excise taxes from the brewers. State governments take excise taxes from the distributors.
And local governments take sales taxes from the retailers. Alcohol pours into consumers mouths and money trickles upwards into the
coffers of retailers, distributors, brewers, and government.
Like any ecosystem, the new beer industry sustains a food chain; it nourishes a pyramid of predators, grazing herbivores, scavengers,
and parasites. In this tiered community, only retailers receive the license to sell to consumers. Only breweries receive the license to
brew. And only distributors, middlemen, receive the contract to the shuttle the beer between brewers and retailers. They are the
trusted intermediaries between warehouse and shelf. The arrangement purred on for decades, growing until beer production reached
all-time highs in the early 1990s, averaging 200 million thirty-one-gallon barrels per year between 1990 and 1995. Then in 1996, New
York distributors pressed their hands on the scale. These distributors lobbied for a bill to extend their contracts with brewers in
perpetuityeternity plus a day. Their contracts would remain exclusive and parceled out county by county. For example, Union Beer
Distributors maintained exclusive rights to distribute all Anheuser-Busch InBev products in Kings County (Brooklyn) until the end of
time. But it could never distribute Anheuser-Busch products in Queens County; that contract was locked up with Anheuser Busch
Distributors of New York (a subsidiary of the mothership, which sidestepped federal regulations through a separate profit and loss
sheet).
When the law was enacted, major brewers like Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller held more than 97 percent of the domestic beer
market. Losing a distribution contract to a major brewer would eviscerate a business. August Busch III, CEO of Anheuser Busch in the
1990s, famously said that he expected 100 percent share of mind from his distributors, some of whom ejected non-Anheuser-Busch
brands from their warehouses. Todays market is a different planet. As of June 2013, the U.S. boasted 2,483 operating craft breweries,
with another 1,250 in the works. Meanwhile, wholesale distributors consolidated nationally. Back in 1996, there were 3,482
distributors, and by 2011, there were about 2,000. To access the New York market, craft brewers now signed the kind of distribution
contracts that had been designed to tame brewing behemoths. As overall beer sales declined for major brewers, craft beer sales
continued to risegrowing 15 percent by volume in 2012, according to The Brewers Association. That year alone, the denizens of New
York City purchased more than 100,000,000 cases of craft beer. In jostling for market share, New York distributors began trading

exclusive contracts with each other like baseball players. For example, in September 2013, Union Beer Distributors traded its rights to
Schmaltz Beer Company, the makers of Coney Island Lager, to Manhattan Beer Distributors. Chris Sheehan, General Manager for
Union Beer, described the deal as tiny in the bigger picture of trading and selling brands. Some craft breweries occasionally fought
back against unfavorable deals. In 2011, Brooklyn Brewery sued an upstate distributor for the right to terminate their contract. In the
end, the brewery bought its freedom through $200,000 in legal fees and the payment of an undisclosed sum. In 2012, New York
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo championed a carve out rule through the legislature that enabled the smallest brewers (less than
300,000 barrels per year) to switch distributors by ponying up the value of their distribution rightsin essence, buying out the
contract. Armed with an escape hatch, craft brewers gained some leverage in accessing the New York market.

The Pumas wait about fifteen minutes for their turn in front of Blue Star. The sun, magnified through their windshield, makes the
dashboard too hot to touch. The line snakes past a diesel station serving trailer trucks on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. The
Pumas inch forward toward the men in orange vests until no one stands in their path. Manuel slides the shifter into park and idles the
maroon Mark III before the warehouse door, which looms large. A greenish Mark III, which could be the twin to the Pumas van, idles
a few spots away. Around them, fathers stand on the asphalt sipping sodas. Moms fan themselves and yell directions. Kids run the
garbage bags to the cavernous door for redemption.
In the three-tiered universe of beer, redemption centers like Blue Star are neither brewers nor distributors nor retailers. They are not
part of the supply chain funneling 96.6 billion beverage containers to consumers. Instead, they are part of the reverse supply chain,
funneling 46.9 billion of those beverage containers back from consumers mouths to factories. Together, the supply chain and the
reverse supply chain create whats called a closed loop system. This loop is what transforms a disposable can made for a one-way
journey into a two-way can that returns to its source. The branded term for this closed loop system is recycling, or, quite literally,
restarting the cycle of production.
Disconnected from all overtures to fuzzy animals and environmentalism, recycling, in practice, is an industrial process. When all the
gears are synchronized in the loop, a consumer can release her grip on an old can and tighten her grip on a brand new can within sixty
dayssixty days for can-to-can resurrection in the retail space. The resurrected can that we press to our lips is therefore ageless; it is
representative of past can forms, its present form and future can forms. Major brewers have come to love the closed-loop
phenomenon because it saves them fractions of a penny per container that aggregates into millions in cost savings per year. Most
major brewers hesitate to publish the value of this windfall, as that number reveals who benefits financially from a system subsidized
by municipalities and taxpayers. But in March 2013, Anheuser-Busch issued a press release trumpeting the success of its three-year
global environmental plan: Recycling initiatives have generated approximately 420 million USD in revenues globally from finding

beneficial uses for recyclable materials generated from AB InBevs processes. Efforts to use water and energy more efficiently also
generated an estimated global cost savings of 92 million USD.
Considering that AB-InBev realized $36.6 billion in global profits from 2010 to 2012, these conservation and recycling efforts
provided an average benefit of .5 percent in profits per yearno small figure in a competitive industry where margins mean expansion
or contraction. That is the point. All the shuffling of hands, from individual to recycling center to factory, raises the great mound of
money half a topographic degree. Recycled aluminum requires 95 percent less energy to process than virgin, or primary, ore. The
potential savings in electricity costs alone is staggering. For though primary aluminum is geologically plentifulthe third most
common element in the Earths crust and the most abundant metalit is costly to acquire and refine.
Makeshift villages of canners appear and disappear around redemption centers like Blue Star, which in turn have popped up and
closed as rising rents push them further and further to the outskirts of Brooklyn. As I observe it, Blue Star seems proud to offer a
drive-thru canning experience for the underbelly. No hassles, explains Manuel. Just get your money. Every Saturday, canning
families line the north side of Flushing Avenue in their vans and SUVs. They do it as family income, explains Sister Ana Martinez de
Luco, who runs a nearby redemption center. When it is summer or Saturdays, she continues, some will bring a child to help with
counting. Ideally, redemption centers do business on the ragged edges of a gentrified circle. Blue Star, in a prime retail location just
three blocks away from the Morgan stop on the L train, is nearing its moment to transplant. A few doors down the street sits Shops at
the Loom, a hipster mall with specialty stores like Bushy Tails pet supplies and Better Than Jam. A short walk leads you to a spate of
Michelin-approved eateries dotting the L train, like Robertas and Northeast Kingdom. The other world encroaches.
Primary aluminum exists in nature in a mineral formation called bauxite, which can be found in nations that sat around the equator
500 million years ago, when the world was still one continent. Nearly all the bauxite consumed in the U.S. today is shipped in from
overseas. The largest deposits are concentrated in far-flung places like Australia, India, Brazil, and a West African nation called
Guinea. Our closest source is Jamaica. From 2008 to 2011, Jamaica accounted for 43 percent of the bauxite hauled into the country,
according to the U.S. Geological Survey. To extract aluminum, bauxite must be refined through a chemical separation called the Bayer
Process, which produces a high alkaline byproduct known as red mud that devastates marine life. The product of the Bayer Process
must be purified an additional stepthrough a current of water and pure electricityto yield aluminum.
To call that process energy intensive is an understatement; its akin to zapping Frankenstein alive with lightning. In the U.S.,
electrolytic processes like these are carried out near public power stations, where they consume six percent of our nations total
electrical generating capacity, according to a report published by The Electrochemical Society. For Alcoa, the worlds leading producer
of aluminum, electricity accounts for 25 percent of aluminum production costs. Yet, tapped into the U.S. power grid, Alcoa only need
generate 29 percent of its own voltage.
The resulting aluminum is chemically no different from the secondary aluminum smelted down from old cans in furnaces. In fact,
secondary aluminum will make the same can for five percent of the greenhouse gas emissions, five percent of the energy, and none of
the costs associated with mining and seagoing transport. According to Trevor Hansen, V.P. of Recycling at Anheuser-Busch InBev,
Every can body could be reconstructed with 90 percent old cans, if you could collect that many.
Perhaps the opportunity for cost savings is why, according to Aluminum Association figures, 75 percent of all the aluminum ever
produced by humanity is still in use. Its operationally easy; its technologically easy; and its economically easy, explains Samantha
MacBride, the former Deputy Director of Recycling at the Department of Sanitation of New York (DSNY) and the author of the book
Recycling Reconsidered. Where theres market demand, things move. Secondary aluminum comes with the added benefit of
bypassing the London Metals Exchange, a global clearinghouse for primary metals, and its onerous warehousing system, which
brewers like MillerCoors LLC accused in 2012 of creating bottlenecks to inflate global aluminum prices by $3 billion. Major brewers
like Anheuser-Busch InBev have created wholly owned subsidiaries to siphon as many cans as possible back to their factories. Starting
in 1978, the Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corporation opened recycling centers and began investing in recycling infrastructurestorage
containers, can blowers, can crushers, etc.throughout the country. By its thirtieth anniversary, the Anheuser-Busch Recycling
Corporation had recovered more than 460 billion aluminum beverage containers.
These recovered cans retrace their steps in a system that vaguely resembled vertical integration. Anheuser-Busch maintains
ownership of its breweries, its major canneries, and its primary scrap supplier; they contract out to their can sheet vendors, secondary
scrap suppliers, and local distributors, though they also own a portion of their distribution system. The only level of the system that
they dont influence directly is the retailers. In its present capacity, as the sole supplier of can scrap to vendor Wise Metals for the

production of the Anheuser-Busch can sheet, the Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corporation helps recycle 25 percent of the cans in the
United States. We want it all going back into can sheet, says Trevor Hansen of AB-InBev. And, you know, to the extent that we
could control it all, we would love to control it all. According to Hansen, 75 percent of the number of cans produced by AB-InBev in
the U.S. are recovered annually, with the caveat that some of this total is shipped in from Canada or Mexico. Thats at least 27 billion
used beverage cans exclusively benefitting the worlds largest brewer, which holds 47.6 percent of the U.S. beer market and
approximately 25 percent of the global beer market. Just consider it: AB-InBev brews one out of every four beers purchased on our
planet.
Several rungs down the food chain are redemption centers like Blue Star: independent scrapyards for plastic, glass, and aluminum
that thrive in bottle deposit states like New York. Redemption centers profit off each states container deposit system by snaring a
state-mandated handling fee for every container in their grasp. This handling fee, a few cents for the trouble, was initially created to
offset the burden placed on retailers to sort, separate, and store thousands of empties on premises. Redemption centers repurposed
this compensatory measure as a profit margin. And who pays for this fee per container? The distributors do, as the price of entry into
beverage markets for states like New York, states with container deposits. But though the distributors comply with deposit law, they
do not do so happily. I lose probably $750,000 a year being a garbage collector, says Chris Sheehan, General Manager of Union Beer
Distributors. He continues, No other consumer product company in America has to pick up its own trash. Not food: think soup cans,
plastic containers of fruit, vegetables, olive oil, vinegar, maple syrup, ice cream, etc. Not dry goods, such as soap, shampoo, tooth
paste, detergent, magazines All that goes into the waste stream. For distributors, payment of this handling fee is not a business
transaction but satisfaction of a regulatory requirement, and redemption centers represented not business partners but beneficiaries
of an unfair system.
Redemption centers dont see their profits as unscrupulous, of course, and neither do the canners, who forage for an unconverted
form of other peoples money. Even Sheehan stopped short at faulting the canners for their work ethics. These are entrepreneurial
people making money off recyclable materials, he says, emphasizing the word entrepreneurial like a mark of character. What
Sheehan faults is a system in which canners are forced to sell their aluminum not at market value but at five cents apiecea five-cent
deposit that he babysits in a convoluted process of selling and salvaging. Blue Star loves people like the Pumas because the Pumas
hand-deliver their source of revenue. Every can accepted is a can for which the distributor, by law, is required to reimburse: five cents
for the container, plus the handling fee.
So the system functions like a relay race with fractions of a dollar, and it plays out like this: First, the retailer gives a nickel to the
distributor when the can is delivered to the shelves. Then, the consumer gives a nickel to the retailer when the can changes hands
again. Make sense? Heres where it gets complicated. Next, the consumer (or the professional canner) gets a nickel from the retailer
(or the professional redemption center) when he returns the empty can. Lastly, the retailer or redemption center gets a nickel, plus
the handling fee, from the distributor when the empty can makes it home. Two cents for every five-cent container, the handling fee in
New York from 1982 to 2009, provides a 40 percent profit margin for redemption centers. In this equation, success depends on
volume alonewhich canners like Fabian and Manuel guaranteed.
Retailers dont mind all the lost handling fees, because retailers rarely deal in enough volume for the empty can fees to amount to
much. Redemption centers, over time, quietly replaced the role of retailers in the dance of cans back to companies. When the 2009
Bigger Better Bottle Bill expansion law passed in New York State, the handling fee rose to 3.5 cents per container. And 3.5 cents on
every five-cent container made for a 70 percent margin of profit for redemption centers. Since the 2009 expansion law went into
effect, more than forty new redemption centers have opened in Brooklyn alone.
When Blue Stars warehouse door rises at 9 a.m. each day, a line of canners awaits with billowy carts. Blue bags hang from old broom
poles like puffs of cotton candy. Business has boomed so well at Blue Star that, in 2011, they opened a second location. Its
overwhelming the amount of people that do it, says Albert Shtainer, Blue Stars owner. Since the economic hardships, people started
counting their pennies. Blue Star deals in serious quantityfar more than New Yorks grocery stores, which often cap redemptions at
240 containers per visit (yielding a paltry $12.00). According to Shtainer, he easily sees 100 canners per day at each location, who all
told redeem more than 40,000 containers.
Manuel riffs in Spanish with the Blue Star employee as his sons pile their cache of bags and boxes. To go inside the warehouse door is
to invite a brush with claustrophobia. Workers heap cans into mounds sorted by brand that rise to the skylights. The piles of crushed
metal look post-apocalyptic, like T2 after Skynet wiped away most of human civilization. Soon, the Mark III sits empty. The man
chatting with Manuel makes his count and tears off the receipt for reimbursement: $155 cash, tax-free. No deposits are taxed in New
York State, as deposits were created not as income but as reimbursement for an amount already paid at the time of purchase. The

Pumas are reclaiming the nickels of countless other people, mostly better-off consumers who do not perceive that nickel as money.
This payment is the culmination of two days canning work for the PumasThursday and Friday. Manuel smiles, as if surprised.
More than I counted. The lines on his cheeks crease in parentheses. Fabian laughs at his disbelief. The Pumas receive an average of
between $350 to $400 a week from Blue Star or, as Manuel puts it, Two vans. Thats between $18,900 and $20,800 a year in taxfree cash, which would place the Pumas below the federal poverty line (defined as $23,550 after taxes for a family of four) and below
the median U.S. family income after taxes ($30,212 for 2010, according to LIS Cross-National Data Center). Earnings of $350 a week
translate into 378,000 cans per year, more than 4,000 hours of canning and $13,230 in handling fee revenue for Blue Star. Blue
Star makes almost as much as the Pumas for the Pumas work.
These transactions, which hold a roof above a family of four, feed an economic engine that leads from Blue Star to Union Beer
Distributors to Alcoa. Alcoas largest mill in Tennessee produces an annual harvest of 1 billion pounds of recycled can sheet. Some
$350 per week means some 7,000 aluminum containers located, transported, sorted, and separated not by Santas elves but by the
Pumas. These canners aggregate a metal that lifted the fortunes of executives and entrepreneurs, like poor hands shaking clean hands
that gathered no dirt.
3. Yes we can
Sure We Can is the Mos Eisley Spaceport of canning, where what can be a lonely and solitary craft becomes a social experience.
When Sister Ana Martinez de Luco powers open the armored doors to Sure We Can redemption center in Bushwick at 7:30 a.m., six
canners stand at the ready. Hours of work await them in their tin village. High above, the contrails of aluminum jetliners arc towards
LaGuardia Airport. Directly below, the subway rumbles as it hooks towards Queens. This place is nothing if not a crossroads for the
living. Sister Ana is a Roman Catholic nun from the Basque region of Spain who moved to New York in 2004 after spending twentythree years in a doll-making shop for Filipino orphans. She dedicated herself to the citys canners and voluntarily became homeless.
Looking out the door of Sure We Can with her thumb firmly pressed on the red button reading OPEN, she watches the children
entering P.S. 147 across the way. A hipster in headphones pushes past the children on his way to the L train. Although, strictly
speaking, these are her neighbors, they live in separate worlds. Often overworked, Sister Ana runs a hand through her pixie gray hair
and squints her eyes slightly, as she tends to do when frustrated by frivolity.

Sister Ana has a humble demeanor, but she can speak in staccato and wield her words to inspire guilt, which she did more than once
to me when my presence became intrusive. Eager for quotes from canners, I hadnt really understooduntil a dressing down from
Ana made it clearthat canning is not a pastime but an occupation, and time is money is cans. Tiny but tough in her denim workwear,
Sister Ana seems almost childlike in her ability to process through anger and accusation to reach forgiveness in a hurry. She traces her
foot in gravel as people stream past the fluorescent street art and animal murals into the 12,000-square-foot lot. Among them is
Malvin, twenty-seven, a student from the Dominican Republic who works at Sure We Can most days. I think some canner may be

crazy for cans, jokes Malvin, who uses Spanish and English interchangeably.
Sure We Can is the Mos Eisley Spaceport of canning, where what can be a lonely and solitary craft becomes a social experience. Its
nice to say hello to people, says Anje, sixty-two, a Polish carpenter who began canning after a workplace accident broke his spine in
twelve places. Its nice to been treated as person, he continues, calling it a miracle that he can walk at all. He dumps a bag full of
sixteen-ounce tallboys onto a plywood table. Many people, they make me feel small. Look at me. I had job. Theyre maybe fine today,
but tomorrow? Gossip on canning locations, health conditions, and city regulations floats around. The city pass ordinance against
canner, insists one Cantonese woman as she crushes a Miller Lite. Read it in the paper, $1,000 fine, responds a fellow canner.
Heads nod in concern, though no one is able to verify the accuracy or find the article later. You put me in New York Times? scoffs
Lydia in my direction when she sees my notebook. She is a grandmother canner who pays the monthly bill on her Chevy sedan one
nickel at a time. You messing with me, in my business, shouts Wanda, a weekend canner who disputes her can count with Malvin.
Ana attempts to parley with a joke. She always mad, says Ana. Always mad but always come back to yell. Feng, a Chinese
immigrant in his eighties, gets by with the two words of English he knows: OK and Cans. Although he has been a morning fixture
since Sure We Can opened in Bushwick in 2010, the language barrier prevents him from conversing. One morning, he showed up with
swollen eyes and a face bruised like a tangerine. Three local teens had ambushed and robbed him, guessing correctly that he didnt
keep his money in a bank.
Instead of chatting, Feng resorts to pointing, smiling, and emoting with his arms. Ana calls this the universal canning language. To
keep from staining his shirts with stale beer, Feng affixes grocery bags to his wrists with rubber bands. His right palm, which he digs
into dumpsters, is scarred into a crag that feels like a fishbone whenever he shakes my hand. He shakes it often.

Although a true census of this underground economy is hard to come by, a 2005 survey by Picture The Homeless placed the city
population of canners at 1,000. Ana estimates that there had been at least a tenfold increase in that number since the downturn in
2009, though a February 2013 article in Edible Geography estimated the community at closer to 5,000. Sure We Can alone sees an
average of sixty canners per day, and I personally encountered more than 400 canners in my reporting there. Considering that Sure
We Can represented one of forty redemption centers in Brooklyn alone by 2014, it becomes easy to extrapolate that New Yorks
canning population is massive. When Sure We Can moved to Brooklyn in 2010, it was one of the only redemption centers. Today,
there are so many in operation that distributors struggle to keep pace with the constant calls for pickups of empty cans and with the
state-regulated accounting rules for tracking millions on millions of nickels. Payment can be slow. They delay so much, says Ana.
And they say to me, You dont understand; when you came, you were the only ones! Sheehan, on the other side of canning logistics,
laments the increase. Distributors cannot make money doing this, he says. Its a huge added expense.

This population boom has generated a commensurate spike in canner diversity. Used to be, it was basically homeless and people of
color who were canning, says Eugene Gadsden, a canning veteran known in the canning community as the King of Cans. Nowadays,
its a whole variety. Chinese. Latin. Kids. Grandmas. Canning has become so ubiquitous that when the Nets were toying with a
rename to publicize their move to from New Jersey to Brooklyn, a Gothamist blogger joked, Considering the boroughs hottest
trends, perhaps The Brooklyn Canners?
Sure We Can is something of a relic in todays can economy: a not-for-profit center, opened by Gadsden and Sister Ana to fill the
vacuum created when We Can, the citys previous not-for-profit center, closed in 2005. After going months without a center to redeem
the river of cans, Manhattan canners began roving with a message of hopeblack shirts that read: Theres a brand new Redemption
Center in New York run by a Canner and a Catholic SisterHallelujah! Sure We Can was up and runningfirst out of a storage unit
on West 29th Street, then out of an empty lot on 30th Street and 5th Avenue. They lost this prime location when a planned demolition
collapsed a neighboring building into their lot. Despite paying $3,000 per month in rent, Ana observed, Our neighbors persecuted
us. In a city where power makes friends, the powerless are often friendless. Five moves later, they found this semi-permanent
location in Bushwick.
Though most redemption centers run as profitable businesses, Sure We Can operates as a form of charitable service. As part of its
mission, Sure We Can shares its handling fees with canners who help to sort, offering up to 1.25 cents extra on top of the five-cent
deposit value. Its a gesture matched by some, but not all, other redeemers, such as Brooklyns Thrifty Redemption Center, which
incentivizes at a total of six cents per can. Were not just for canners, we are canners, explains Ana, who spent four years in
training with Eugene Gadsden before transitioning into her role as a canning advocate. According to federal 990 tax records, Sure
We Can posted a net loss of $20,780 in 2009. It recouped in 2010, posting a net profit of $16,875, and lost money again in 2011, this
time to the tune of $14,554. Its financial track record was an oddity among redemption centers like Thrifty and Blue Star, both of
which make healthy profits. Sure We Can also sticks out among redemption centers in that it offers space for canners to sort on
premises. That kind of preparation is usually relegated to homes, like the Pumas apartment, or adjacent streets, like Flushing Avenue
for Blue Star Beverages.
Sure We Can watched three neighboring redemption centers spring up as the gaggle of students and young professionals migrated
along the L train to Graham Avenue, then to Grand Street, then to Montrose Avenue. For a minute, we were thinking our mission
had finished, admits Ana, noting the ease with which canners could redeem at reverse vending machines near grocery stores like
Associated Supermarket, off Knickerbocker Avenue, or Key Food, off Wyckoff Avenue. But the canners kept coming.
Behind the sorting stations at Sure We Can rises a half-moon metal hangar holding thousands of twenty-four-pack boxes. On the left,
a Mount Trashmore of cans grows out of a chain link holding bin. According to many canners, beer and soda distributors maintain
stringent requirements for recollection. Twelve-ounce cans go 240 a bag, except for Blue Sky Beverages, which prefers 220. Bottles go
twenty-four a box, seventy boxes a pallet, except for Union Beer Distributors, which prefers fifty-six a pallet. Its an inconvenience
most redeemers passed on to clientele. That makes it take twice as long to sort as to can, says Eugene Gadsden.
Sure We Can chooses to share in the responsibility by checking and double-checking each sort. Pack incorrectly, and distributors
often refuse to load the containers onto their trucks. To get paid, canners know implicitly that Bud Light and Dogfish go in the Union
Beer towers, while Coke Zero and Diet Coke go in the bags for Blue Sky. Once in a while, brands switch distributors, and Malvin
struggles to communicate the change. His challenge is akin to breaking a gambler out of a system. Oftentimes, he is reduced to hand
gestures. I make nice ones, they make sometimes not so nice ones, he says.

When the thirty-two-foot delivery truck from Union Beer pulls into Sure We Can, its as if Elvis has emerged. Malvin whistles with his
fingers, and canners converge on the truck from inside the hangar. This sixteen-wheel truck has made more than twenty deliveries
across the city since leaving Union Beer this morning. Its belly is empty. On the last leg of his trip, the driver seems eager to return to
home base. He steps out with a clipboard and inspects the columns and bales for redemptiondenying some and accepting others.
Ana fires up a second-hand orange Toyota forklift, which has a habit of breaking down the moment she needs it. She pilots the
machine like Lieutenant Ripley, maneuvering massive pallets of bottles wrapped in cellophane as if they were weightless. A fire
brigade of hands links together to move the mountain of cans toward the truck. They stuff the cans floor to ceiling. The mass of
containers threatens to engulf the bodies always pushing, pushing the cans inward, like Japanese train conductors packing people
into trains. The Union man never pays upon delivery. When the truck fills up completely, he invoices Ana and takes off for
headquarters, over the border in Queens. Ana will look to the mail for the check from Union Beer Distributors, within sixty days. Until
then, shell front what she is able to canners who redeem.
Its telling that Eugene Gadsden had been absent from Sure We Can for many months. Malvin, whom Ana calls irreplaceable, holds
the King of Cans old job. Indeed, on June 8, 2011, after stewarding this not-for-profit through five relocations, Eugene took an
unannounced leave of absence. Perhaps success had sapped the fun from the venture. In 2009, Sure We Can redeemed 200,000
containers a month. By 2011, theyd surpassed a million.
Eugene had often fought with Ana over the direction Sure We Can. According to Drew Swope, twenty-seven, a community organizer
who spent a year living on the streets with the twosome, Eugene quit several times when the organization was in its infancy. In
October 2008, Ana became stricken with Lyme disease and spent weeks at St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital on the Upper West Side.
When Eugene paid her a visit to part ways, Ana wouldnt have it. Ana chased him out of the hospital and into the subway,
remembers Drew Swope, the organizer. She was in her, like, onesie.
Though Eugene continued to be listed on Sure We Cans board of directors until 2011, the King of Cans had returned to his old habits.
As I like to say, the streets is my home, he says. I got a great love for canning, and its hard to walk away from it.
4. Wasted
The narrative of Americans winning the war on garbage just by thinking green and separating glass from paper seems divorced from
reality.

Americans threw away 153 billion beverage containers in 2010, according to a report by a recycling watchdog group called the
Container Recycling Institute. That equates to two out of every three beverage containers going straight to the landfill or incinerator
500 containers wasted for every man, woman, and child in our population. Imagine 45 billion aluminum cylinders making the slow
march to the dump. Then do it again each year.

New York City runs the largest curbside recycling program in the nation, serving more than 3 million households, plus public schools
and city institutions. Yet, this program is battling a 50 percent drop in curbside recycling, according to the Mayors Management
Reports, from 35.1 percent of garbage recycled in 2002 to 16.6 percent in 2012. Recycling tons per shift on the average DSNY truck
have decreased year over year since 2005. Every minute, this metropolis produces more than twenty-five tons of trash. Of Gothams
roughly $2 billion annual budget for solid waste management, about $300 million is currently spent to export the 3.3 million tons of
collected waste to states like Pennsylvania and Virginia. And though the United States represents 5 percent of the global population,
our nation generates 30 percent of the worlds garbage.
Among the most valuable wasted items are simple, shiny, ubiquitous beverage containers. Though these beverage containers
represent only 6 percent of our waste, they represent one quarter of all recyclables by weight. The act of recycling a beverage container
therefore provides an outsized benefit: an in-demand item that, in the case of aluminum and glass, could be reused again and again.
In 2012, the United States eclipsed China to become the worlds leader in energy waste, according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration. Fifty eight percent of the energy our nation produced was squandered instantly to basic inefficiencies, like heat loss.
All the while, the U.S. industrial sector consumed more energy per year than any other U.S. entity. U.S. industry mined, transported,
burned, and pumped 4 million pounds of material each year to meet the needs of one average middle-class American family.
Considering that residential households produce only 55 percent of national waste, according to IBISWorld, a business consultant, the
narrative of Americans winning the war on garbage just by thinking green and separating glass from paper seems divorced from
reality.
Ninety two percent of Americans agree that recycling is important for the earth and future generations, according to a 2012 Ipsos
survey, while 86 percent report feeling good about themselves for recycling. Three quarters of Americans claim to recycle every day.
One of the most encouraging things weve been seeing over the past five years is the recycling rate in the U.S. slowly ticking up, says
Trevor Hansen of the Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corporation. He continues, Theres still room for consumers to pick that can up,
pick that bottle up, finish that product and do the right thing. Though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency touts a rising
national recycling rate, 34.5 percent of U.S. garbage recycled in the year 2012, the majority of materials recovered was organic: yard
trimmings, food waste, etc. Yard trimmings and the like are composted into soil, nutrients feeding nutrients; there is no cradle to
cradle, except in the grand sense. Paper and cardboard, coveted by Chinese manufacturers for things like shoeboxes, survive just four
to six cycles before the cellulose fibers break down. Our nations other recyclables, materials that cannot biodegrade, such as
aluminum, go to trash heaps in colossal amounts: half of the cans, two thirds of the glass bottles and four fifths of the plastic
containers.

Meanwhile, beverage sales expanded 3.8 percent per year from 2000 and 2010 as overall recycling rates for beverage containers
plateaued around 37 percent. Peak beverage container recycling rates of the early 90s have decreased, in direct proportion to the
percentage Americans with access to curbside recycling. Yet, a cultural perception persists that recycling is a solved mattercase
closed, like public smoking or the ozone layer. In April 2013, CBS ran a story entitled Is recycling worth it? in which it cited a 1997
story from The Onion that ran with the headline, EPA: Recycling Eliminated More Than 50 Million Tons Of Guilt in 96.
As Americans consume more on credit outside of homes they strain to afford, theyve remained less and less likely to recycle in public
spacesfood courts, food carts, stadiums, arenas, train stations, according to a 2013 survey by Environmental Industry Associations
(EIA). Meanwhile, domestic beverage sales have grown year over year, with 90 billion units sold in 1980 and 243 billion units sold in
2010. Imbibing more liquids from more containers, we play the losers game of recycling at the same levels with the same methods.
Consequently, weve lost our grip on the pace of recyclables; the gains of the early 90s have been lost, and recyclable materials now
slip through our fingers as we stumble like Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate conveyor.
In the world of aluminum, each can lost is a can that must be replaced with virgin materials, while its brothers sit buried and
immortal as vampires. There would be, to my knowledge, no reason why you couldnt mine landfills if it were worth the cost,
observes Samantha MacBride, author of the book Recycling Reconsidered. But were talking about the free market, and it isnt.
Because aluminum is non-ferrous, it cannot be attracted with a magnet like steel rebar and common household appliances. In the
chaos of a landfill, the can would have to be picked by hand.
When the State of New York passed the Returnable Container Act of 1982, better known as the Bottle Bill, its primary goal was litter
reduction. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which was responsible for deposit law implementation
from 1982 to 2009, still credits the law with reducing roadside litter in New York by 70 percent. Indeed, when Hawaii became the
eleventh state in the nation to pass a bottle bill in 2002putting a five-cent deposit on beer and soda cansthe state reported a 45
percent reduction in beverage container litter within three years. The proposition for consumers in a container deposit state is simple:
When a can becomes currency, why throw that currency away? By incentivizing container recollection, deposit bills split the
responsibility of waste disposal between consumers and producers. Nobody wants to be out a nickel. Beer and soft drink distributors
could claim unredeemed nickels as extra revenue, though it is true that the burden also fell to distributors for accepting the cans and
selling them back to industries. The end result was actually a lot of recycling, as well as very entrepreneurial uses, says Laura
Haight, senior environmental associate at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), an organization credited with
shepherding the original legislation.
Yet, more than three decades into the recycling experiment, the success of gathering and re-forging aluminum cans remains an
anomaly. Aluminum is the one material type out of the common household recyclables that always pays for itself in the recycling
process, says Susan Collins, Executive Director of Container Recycling Institute, an advocate for recycling. Theres no other material
type that always pays for itself. In a market system, the ability to recycle any item is dependent on profitability for the end buyer,
which is usually a business entity studying comparative price models business between virgin and recycled materials. Remember:
recycling is an industry that involves supply chains of resources, not a social program controlled by consumers. The recycling of
material back into production is, therefore, a calculated business maneuver that weighs market demand for materials against the costs
of acquiring and moving it. Recycling is a transportation business, says Collins. Material has to be transported from A to B, and
whos paying for the shipping? High demand, plus low transportation costs, means incentive to recycle, as is the case for aluminum,
lead batteries, cardboard, PET plastics (soda and water bottles), and HDPE plastics (bottle caps). Extremely high demand, plus high
transportation costs means equally healthy incentive to recycle, as with steel. Unpredictable demand, plus low transportation costs
means sporadic incentive to recycle, as with paper. Low demand, plus high transportation costs, means minimal incentive to recycle,
as with glass or mixed plastic. Of all these materials, metals like steel and aluminum net the highest secondary market prices, which
virtually guarantee resale (and resale ad infinitum). Plastic bottles and bottle caps spring for one successful rebirth before they
degrade, which is why they are often turned into non-recyclable items like picnic tables or fleece jackets or polyfill. This conversion of
a recyclable item into a non-recyclable item is referred to as downcycling, because the process only delays the landfill by one
lifecycle. Everything else chances on a buyer: no buyer, no recycling.
To explain the market logic another way, when no demand exists for the recyclables we set at curbside, that material has to go
somewhere beyond the recycling center. Theres nothing sacred or magical about a consumers intention to recycle that businesses
purchasing those recyclables from municipal recycling centers or beverage distributors have to honor. It is not a social contract. Once
we set out the trash, that trash ceases to be our property. The power of the sorting ritualof neatly stacking the papers and making
sure we rinse out those yogurt containersis in our heads, much like the artwork on a can. No one can predict when low-demand
materials will find a secondary buyer or end up stewing in methane six feet under. Unwanted recyclables ship daily from sorting

stations to incinerators and landfills. Theres a reason they call it waste.

According to the historian Bartow J. Elmore, in his essay The American Beverage Industry, major beverage manufacturers began
producing prolific amounts of waste in the 1950s by switching to one-way, nonreturnable containers in an attempt to secure greater
profits. Prior to this shift, local bottlers operated with a voluntary deposit model that encouraged consumers to return two-way glass
bottles for a few extra cents. Think milk bottles delivered by a milkman. Beverage cans, and other one-way devices, had not been born
yet. The system operated efficiently. The average two-way container made twenty-two trips from bottler to consumer and back. Softdrink containers posed a return rate of 96 percent as late as 1948. Thats eight years before the Coca-Cola Company began
experimenting with one-way containers and fifteen years before non-returnable cans would comprise 11 percent of all soda sales. Yet,
the market finally tipped to one-way containers not because of the rise of soda but because of the expansion of Big Beer following the
collapse of local breweries during the drought of Prohibition. In 1933, three major beer conglomerates (Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and
Schlitz) surveyed a national landscape devoid of old competitors. In 1933, 381 breweries remained where, in 1918, 1,092 had stood.
For businesses with burgeoning supply chains, the steel MiraCan and then the lighter aluminum can represented the ultimate oneway tickets: strong devices that could ship across country at minimal expense.
A litter epidemic ensued in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that birthed anti-litter organizations like Keep America Beautiful, which were
funded (ironically) by the likes of Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, and Anheuser-Busch, major manufacturers of litter materials. The term
litterbug, created by a New York City copywriter for The American Ad Council in 1947, entered our vocabulary as a way of shaming
not the profligate manufacturer but the careless consumer. A famous 1970s public service announcement funded by Keep America
Beautiful featured a Native American warrior who shed a single tear at the sight of a driver throwing trash on the side of a highway.
People start pollution. People can stop it, concluded the narrator. Meanwhile, cigarette butts filled beaches like ashtrays, and
pullback can tops scattered across playgrounds. Shiny cans painted to attract eyes at the shelf continued to attract those eyes as they
filled with dirt on the ground. Even worse: Each piece of litter bore the unmistakable logo of its maker. Coca-Cola President Paul
Austin lamented in the 60s how colored decoration on a can or the unique shape of our bottle doesnt deteriorate. The same logo
designed to elevate consumer perceptions could diminish those perceptions later on, as the power of logo arises from association.
The beverage industrys most precious commodityits image of innocent funwas at stake, wrote Elmore.
A consumer backlash ensued in the birth of the environmental movement and the creation of Earth Day, first held on April 22, 1970.
Companies took major steps to harness the debate about who was responsible for managing all this waste. Despite the publicity game,
a fact remained: Trash and the pollution that attends it emanate first and foremost from systems of production that exist to make
profit, as wrote Samantha MacBride, in an essay in for Satya magazine, Waste and Citizenship. Even as companies outspent
environmentalists to win the perception war, the problem of litter persisted. But if consumers could be shamed into thinking that the
waste was their fault, and their responsibility, then all the better for the companies. MacBride continued, Encouraging individuals to
make a difference, in contrast, poses no threat to producer autonomy, and often creates new opportunities for profit.
So long as the demand for convenience remained, producers could exploit that demand and outsource the consequences. And our
habits traveled with us. In the Vietnam War, the river of uprooted peasants, driven from villages by American B52 bombers and C123s dropping Agent Orange, built slum cities outside U.S. Army bases using empty beer and soda cans. They scavenged these cans
from American dumps, fishing them from between steak bones and ice cream cartons. They cut them open, pounded them flat, and
nailed them into metal walls bearing the logos of Budweiser and Pabst and Coca-Cola. It was as if the can played its part too well too
for long and needed help disappearing.
The soda and beer industries faced two options for reducing litter and solving the image problem: pay for it themselves or find a
means to get it funded by someone else. Companies could fund it voluntarily, by switching back to a two-way container system, or
involuntarily, through state intervention, which would mean being subjected to packaging restrictions or container-deposit
legislation.
But state interference in the transaction of business invoked mixed feelings. Deposit legislation, a nickel or so on each can,
represented a government entity stepping in to finagle the one-way supply chain back into a two-way loop. To spark demand and
jumpstart the reverse supply chain, state governments placed an outsized cash value on an empty can: five cents in most states, like
New York; ten cents in Michigan. For producers, every deposit represented a threat to their autonomy, as it subjected the containers
to a government regulation. In the history of the New York State deposit system, the market value of an aluminum can has never
exceeded the deposit. The closest it reached in recent memory was 2010, when market prices for secondary aluminum reached about
three cents per can, not including costs of labor. Under deposit law, this differential is reconciled out of the pockets of beverage
distributors to the tune of 2 to 3 cents per can, plus the handling fee, plus cost of labor and resources.

Thats how Chris Sheehan of Union Beer Distributors loses money recycling aluminum cans each year. By his estimates, 60 percent of
the 96 million containers per year he releases into New York end up back at his doorstep. Then, he attempts to resell them on the
secondary market. Hes found a regular buyer in the aluminum giant Alcoa, which gives him around 50 cents per pound of can scrap.
Sometimes more. His mixed plastic has no market value, and so he gives the material away for free to clear space in his warehouse.
His glass has lukewarm market value, though the material, like aluminum, has an endless capacity to revive itself. Still, little incentive
exists to turn a glass bottle back into a glass bottle when its cheaper to make a new one from plentiful raw resources: sandstone or
fine white sand. Need sand? Look to a desert or the ocean floor or countless geological formations. In the best-case scenario, recycled
glass becomes ground up into asphalt. End of cycle. Asphalt, itself, cannot be turned back into glass. We drive over this surface until it
cracks.

Sandwiched between the Vanisee Food Corporation and Fire Engine Company No. 206 in the industrial badlands of Queens, is a brick
fortress. Behind an iron fence sits a stronghold of steel warehouses and bunker-like structures. A logo of an eagle with its wings
wrapped inside a letter A faces the sidewalks of Grand Avenue. This symbol, the mark of Anheuser Busch InBev, provides the only
clue to infrequent passersby that this land has been consecrated to the church of beer. Behind iron bars, ever-present cameras, and
shielded warehouse doors sits a room encased in bulletproof glass where workers counted out several hundred thousand dollars in
cash; thats how retailers, eager to keep things liquid, tended to pay Union Beer Distributors.
Perched in an office above the main entrance, General Manager Chris Sheehan has this money hauled away each day in an armored
vehicle. He observes its procession like a warden in a watchtower. This daily haul bodes well for Brooklyns beer drinkers. The
availability of new and exotic brews depends on an incentivized system of distributionrooting out this liquid manna from all ends of
the world. After all, nothing moves in a market without motivation. With the state tracking container depositsjust a fraction of the
beer mother lodeas a source of public revenue, distributors like Sheehan and company are audited quarterly. He, despite mixed
feelings, cooperates fully, in order to retain access to the beer Valhalla that is New York City.
Each of Sheehans forty delivery trucks, which leave the headquarters at 8:00 a.m., return at the end of each day with approximately
$10,000 in cash. With the empty trucks lined up like train cars, the day crew turns it over to the night shift. This second team will
punch in from 7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. to load deliveries for the next morning. Cans wait in numbered stacks on pallets and wooden
platforms that rise three stories high in Unions refrigerated warehouses. Two hundred fifty people work around the clock, six days a
week, to ferry beer through this staging ground. For taste and preservation considerations, the product never rises above 65 degrees in
its journey.

In the waiting room, a man in a leather jacket waltzes in and says, Hey, a six-pack to go. The Union Beer receptionist, a hipster in a
cardigan, shrugs and shakes his head no. What you mean no? jokes the man as he takes a seat. He has been clued in to the irony
that, due to federal law, the largest distributor of craft beer in America cant sell a single can of beer to a consumer.
The waiting room sits behind two doors with separate buzzers. Four visible cameras observe the four chairs lining the wall. Near the
corner by the bathroom hangs a Thomas Kinkade-style painting of a Budweiser deliveryman handing a crate of beer to a truck driver.
In this painting, the truck driver has somehow helped the deliveryman and Budweiser is returning the favor. The driver grins while
his Dalmatian sits eyeing the case of beer exchanging hands, as if anticipating a treat. Its title, A Case of Gratitude1941, is a hat tip
to the lineage of L. Knife & Son, the parent company of Union Beer Distributors. The business of L. Knife & Son, family-owned since
1898, predates this homage to the innocence of pre-World War II America. On December 7, 1941, shortly after this watercolor was
done, the U.S. would enter the international theater and never leave it. Aluminum-body P-51 fighters soared over North Africa and
found homes on Germany runways. Cylindrical aluminum B-29 bombers rolled off conveyors and dropped their payloads over
Nagasaki and Hiroshima. According to a wartime U.S. propaganda film, enough aluminum was stored at American B-29 factories to
lay a silver carpet over every street in Tokyo.
L. Knife & Sons began its relationship with Anheuser Busch in 1934, when a Budweiser representative bearing a sample case of beer
turned up at the office of Louis Knife in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Knife hadnt heard the name Budweisersome St. Louis beerin
his thirty-six years of distributing. He couldnt even pronounce the word. But its brewery, he reasoned, must be poised for expansion
with a salesman this far from home. After mulling it over for a month, Knife took the risk of distributing a no-name in his state. Four
generations later, Anheuser Busch represented the companys largest and longest standing client, accounting for more than 70
percent of Knifes case volume. In 2010, BeverageWorld named L. Knife & Son Wholesaler of the Year. In 2014, Beer Business
Daily listed L. Knife as the sixth-largest beer distributor in the nation, with estimated annual sales of more than $750 million. The
arteries of this vast financial network pulse as if powered by the happy hearts of beer lovers. Beer in. Cans out. Beer in. Cans out. The
flagship distribution center of this network, which stretches across fourteen states, is Union Beer Distributors, run by Chris Sheehan.
Sheehan bounds down the stairs to shake my hand. Youre lucky, cause I never talk to reporters, he says. It makes me laugh. With
the brands that he represents attracting so much press on their own, Sheehan believes that keeping anything other than the lowest
profile is disadvantageous to his work. Upstairs in his office, bookcases and bureaus overflow with brewing books and sample cans
and bottles. Sheehan smiles often, a man who loves his trade. Over his career, hes parlayed that love into partnering with the finest
breweries and tasting their finest beers. Union Beers portfolio includes such epicurean ales as Cantillon and Harviestoun, products
that he believes have a place at white-linen-table restaurants.
Since buying the distribution rights to the entire portfolio of the Craft Brewers Guild (started by the Brooklyn Brewery) in 2003,
Union has catered to what he describes as some of the most sophisticated drinkers in the country. Standing tall, tan, and thin, with
brown-green eyes and a clean-shaven head, Sheehan has all the assurance of a patricianhardworking, self-effacing, confident, and
generous, yet also smiled upon by fate. He graduated from Tulane in New Orleans in his early twenties and went to work in the family
business shortly thereafter. The Jack Kennedy of his clan, with model looks, he matches a winning style with a talent for sales built on
sincerity and a flair for anecdotes. The mans knowledge of beer is encyclopedic, and hes traveled the world from brewery to brewery
expanding it. He has a way of making connections feel personal that endears him to brewmasters, who often hail from blue-collar
backgrounds and deal in handshakes. All of his 250 employees receive copies of Randy Moshers Tasting Beer and Garrett Olivers
The Oxford Companion to Beer as required reading. Sheehan works tirelessly to expand his empire of suds, commuting back and
forth over the Whitestone Bridge to his home in Larchmont, New York. In that upscale Westchester County hamlet, he lives in an
impressive but not ostentatious house valued at $2.7 million dollars that abuts the Long Island Sound. A lucky guy, by his own
admission, he gives back. Every year the Sheehan Family Foundation donates more than $550,000 for the preservation of
environmental havens in eastern Massachusetts, Brooklyn, and Haitinearly the amount he loses each year to container recycling.
Zipping up a black fleece, he pours himself a cup of coffee from the office pot and leads me down a flight of stairs to the Willy Wonka
chocolate factory of beer. You ready for this? he asks with a grin, as he opens the door to the Budweiser room, our first stop in his
120,000-square-foot maze of warehouses. Id never seen so much beer. All of the Budweiser consumed by Brooklyn sit in this place.
Twenty-four-pack briefcases of Budweiser cans are lined up like bricks in a wall. Twelve-pack cases of Budweiser bottles are stacked
like Legos, seven high and eight wide per pallet. They heaped these pallets three high, so that they rise within feet of the forty-foot
ceilings. Industrial air conditioners cool the floors, and ceiling fans pump out the heat. Clearly, this room is for babying the beer, not
for coddling human beings. I shiver in the space, even though it is 80 degrees outside, and I realize why Sheehan had poured himself a
hot drink. Sheehan walks me past a mountain of Bud Light Lime. My brother in-law drinks that despicable stuff, and I couldnt
imagine such widespread demand. But there it is.

Each Anheuser-Busch case bears a secret code, Sheehan explains, which delineates its brewery of origin. As of 2012, Anheuser-Busch
operates thirteen separate breweries in the United States. Twenty-two-ounce bottles of Budweiser are marked WT-34, which means
they came from Williamsburg, Virginia. Twelve-pack boxes of twelve-ounce Bud Light cans marked NE-15 come from Newark, New
Jersey. The twenty-four-ounce tallboy cans labeled NH-87 originate in Merrimack, New Hampshire. BN on the thirty-six-pack of
twelve-ounce cans indicates Baldwinsville, New York. In just one corner of this room, Anheuser-Busch has pooled the outputs of four
breweries to satisfy Brooklyns thirst. All of this will be sold in thirty days, says Sheehan. Totally refreshed and replaced. As the
beer itself is only fit to drink for forty-five days after its birth, Sheehan knows the sprint that must ensue to get a case of seventeenday-old beers out to corner stores. Timing isnt just a factor for Budweiser, of course, but for every beer in his domain. Union
represents more than 300 breweries, counting its recent acquisition of Bells Brewery out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. His forty truck
drivers make more than 1,000 deliveries per day. Seventy percent of cases delivered consist of Anheuser-Buschs portfolio: Stella
Artois, Leffe, and Goose Island but also the more pedestrian Busch, Natural Ice, and Bud Light Straw-Ber-Rita. The other portion of
his collection consists of craft notables and imports like Chimay and Duvel. Recently, growth in the craft portion of his business has
outpaced his day-to-day responsibilities to the King of Beers. According to Ben Steinmann, publisher of Beer Market Insights, this
careful blend of craft and mass product puts Union Beer, and L. Knife by extension, in an enviable position: offering a robust craft
portfolio while maintaining its place among the largest AB-InBev distributors in the nation. L. Knife is what many AB-InBev
distributors these days long to be: less dependent on AB-InBev, Steinmann theorizes in a book called The Craft Beer Revolution. He
continues, L. Knife is one of the only AB-InBev distributors that sells a high percentage of its volume in non-AB-InBev products.
Without question, L. Knifes long-standing relationship with Anheuser Busch has earned the distributorship an uncommon level of
trust with a brewer that once demanded 100 percent mind-share.
Orange Toyota forklifts buzz between stacks like worker bees. Drivers in reflective vests grab headphones dangling from wires, which
they use to communicate with dispatch on what row, what number and how many pallets to lift. Every last case has to be marked and
tracked, and each worker contends with 3,000 SKUs (or Stock Keeping Units, which tally the number of beer types in inventory) the
moment he or she walks onsite. New hires often get lost. Sheehan stretches out his arms as we stroll through the dangling strips of
clear plastic that separate the keg room from the Budweiser roomthousands of gleaming, silvery casks in an enclosure that feels like
the belly of a barge. Then, we pass into the craft room, where 30 percent of Unions case volume awaits. A rainbow of fonts and fourcolor graphics overloads my brain, to the point that I have to look away. Its as if all my friends have coalesced in one place: Session
Ale, Rogue, Allagash, Blue Point. My heart races, and I begin to feel tipsy. It is hard to believe that so much of the effect of beer could
be found in the packaging. Sheehan has triangulated his business to benefit from the rise of the crafts and the cannibalism of major
brewers. I see Anheuser-Busch winning the war against MillerCoors, whose brands are essentially eating each others market share,
he says. Every Coors Light gain is a Miller Lite loss. Meanwhile, craft is on the rise. Sheehan ducks and guides me between rows
with a puckish zeal. Most definitely, this job doesnt get old for him.
Every two months, Union braces for an onslaught of seasonals that come directly to these shelves, too. We have more seasonal beers
now than seasons, says Sheehan. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, plus Oktoberfest, plus Holiday, mean at least six seasonal beers
per year from many craft breweries. Close to every beer Ive ever tasted winks back at me, plus some Ive never seen. Some breweries
dont even put labels on their most exclusive products. They come in hay-stuffed crates and wine-shaped bottles known only to beer
aficionados. Grabbing a corked Flying Dog Wild Dog Schwarz, a smoked double lager that retails at around eighteen dollars per bottle,
Sheehan exclaims, Now, this is absolutely one of the best beers in the world.
Scattered among Scottish barrel-aged Harviestouns and rare Trappist brews from Belgian monasteries sit rows on rows of cans: Dales
Pale Ale, Bronx Pale Ale, Ballast Point, Sixpoint, Two Brothers Side Kick. They look elegant, beautiful, inconspicuous among the best
ales in the world.
A short jaunt outside takes us to a separate, 40,000-square-foot structure, and I see where half the cans in Brooklyn, and most of the
crafts in the five boroughs, come crawling back. Thirty employees, full-time and unionized with health benefits and profit sharing,
make an hourly wage shoveling and shaping millions of cans. Here, the spoils of redemption centers and bodegas spill onto troughs
and conveyors, which lead into a funnel. Down this spout pours a rush of colors, stimulating the brain with brand suggestion, until it
fills a $100,000 can crusher. This industrial vice applies the hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure needed to crumple 66,000
aluminum cans into a two-ton six-sided diefive foot by five foot by five foot. When the vice spreads apart, the resulting creation is
dense and smooth to the touch. Yet it smells of humanity, of parties and laughing and mouths and, strangely, breathing. It shines in
the light, like the Lunar Lander from the Apollo missions. From another angle, though, you could see that the paint keeps its character
as trademarks warp, and the resulting visage seems to devalue all Id previously felt. The magic of packaging, I can see, has been a
lure; there is nothing sanctified about it now. Yet, it is wonderful all the same. The bales are wrapped in wire for safekeeping, then
lined up side by side and one atop another until they are roughly the shape of a truck. Twice a week, a fifty-three-foot doublewide semi

the size of Optimus Prime ventures in from Alcoa to gobble up the cubes and restart the circle of life.
The cubes will be stripped of paint and melted down into pure aluminum ingots, which look like silver bullion. They will be pressed
into can sheet and then sculpted into empty vessels at the canneries. Finally, the empty vessels will be transferred to breweries for
refilling. Its a beautiful processone that rivals most achievements of industrialism. A locomotive engine cant reinvent itself like
that. Neither can the microchip or antiseptics or antibiotics. Neither can a cell phone or an airplane or telecommunications wires. We
think human achievement is important because it represents our bid to live forever, like the Empire State Building. Its funny, but
when one of those achievements actually brushes the chance to reach eternity, we call it garbage.

5. Kings of Cans
How like the can is he as a grown manstrong, light, and resilient, eternal in his work ethic, overflowing with niceties and yet born of
the worlds furnace.
As a collective of for-profit institutions that value revenue over social or environmental concerns, the beverage industry closed ranks
in opposition to the first bottle bills, which passed in Oregon and Vermont in 1972 and Maine and Michigan in 1976. To date, seven
more states have passed deposit laws, although corporate-friendly Delaware became the first to repeal its twenty-eight-year-old
deposit law in 2010. The beverage industry continues its battle to repeal or roll back the container deposit in New York State; in 2009,
it spent millions in a failed effort to stymie an expansion of the deposit. In general, upstanding members of the supply chain do not
want to be in the dirty business of the reverse supply chain. Youve got the American Association of Manufacturers in total alliance
with the beverage and bottling industry in opposing bottle bills, says Samantha MacBride, the recycling author and expert. And the
reason is that theyre concerned that the additional five or ten cents is going to diminish their sales, which it doesnt. But the idea that
there should be a government imposed fee that distorts the economics of the system in order to benefit the poor and clean up the
streets seems absurd to them.

To solve the problem, distributors like Sheehan advocate for the reversal of deposit laws and accentuate the upside for municipalities
who take up the slack. Our logic is you, the City of New York, have an opportunity to make a ton of money, he explains. You can
collect all this aluminum and sell it. Lawmakers dont get that in ten states. In forty other states, they do get it. Sheehan contends
that recycling rates are lower in New York than they would otherwise be because of this archaic law. He bases his belief that more
recyclables would yield greater profits on data from non-deposit cities like Seattle, which shows that municipal programs can generate
revenue from recyclable materials in years when demand is high. Yet, Seattles revenue from recycling more than 50 percent of its
waste between the years 2010 through 2012 amounted to only around $3.2 million per yearmoney, yes, but not a ton. Its also not
clear how much of this revenue came from cans alone. Still, municipalities, and American taxpayers by proxy, have become the
beverage industrys preferred workhorse for waste management, bearing the full financial risk and garnering the occasional rewards.
Through the resilience of the can and the muscle of municipalities, industry has found a way to not just reduce litter but also to profit
from its reduction. According to the Can Manufacturers Institute, more than 100,000 aluminum cans are melted and re-forged in the
U.S. every minute, which saves participating companies the energy equivalent of one barrel of crude oil every two seconds. But an
inconvenient truth remains: municipal collection is not enough. Aluminum suppliers count on the aluminum recovered from deposit
programs to satisfy beverage industry demand for secondary cans. The aluminum industry knows that just relying on existing
curbside programs doesnt get them the aluminum that they need, says MacBride. She continues, They hope to somehow achieve
what bottle bills achieve without the onerous regulation. So, they are in a very ambivalent position. Recycling, through decades of
corporate lobbying and public service branding, has been seared in our minds as a consumer choice. Curbside recycling, as it was
branded, to associate municipal pickup with drive-thru efficiencies, became the cure-all that would enable recycling without
subjecting businesses to regulations that, businesses argued, killed jobs. Senator Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, a proponent of federal
container deposit bills that failed in the U.S. Senate in 1972 and 1976, called this argument the smokescreen of job losses and
economic doom. Victories for the beverage industry gained momentum throughout the 1980s, and the number of municipal
recycling programs in the U.S. increased to 600 by 1989, and 4,000 by 1992. In 2009, there were more than 9,000.
In the state of New York, deposit law predates most municipal curbside recycling efforts. New York City began limited voluntary
recycling, for newspapers only, in 1986. Each of the past twenty-five years since city began recycling metal, glass, and plastic, the city
has paid a vendor a per-ton fee to remove these materials from its sorting centers. Emphasis: there is no natural market demand for
the citys metal, glass, and plastic; the city pays for someone to accept its aluminum. This metal often comes mixed with glass and
PET plastic bottles, which must be removed before they explode in a smelting furnace. From 2006 to 2012, the DSNY paid an average
of $14.29 million per year in processing fees to recycle metal, glass, and plastic. The Department of Sanitation is collecting what has,
basically, been picked clean of the most valuable materials, says Samantha MacBride. She continues, But even if there was no
scavenging and everybody threw aluminum into curbside recycling, yes it would enrich the mix somewhat, but it would still cost the
city money to recycle. Container deposits, meanwhile, have encouraged consumers to recycle more than ninety billion containers in
New York State since the programs inception. These aluminum cans have been picked, separated by size, and organized by thousands
of hands. It was a policy established to address one problem, argues Laura Haight of NYPIRG, the recycling advocacy group, that
ended up being a win, win, win on so many levels.

According to Container Recycling Institute figures, 46 percent of the beverage containers recycled in the U.S. came from our eleven
bottle deposit states. These eleven states, which recycled almost half of our containers, represented just 28 percent of our nations
population. In deposit states, the aluminum can recycling rate averaged 84 percent. In the thirty-nine non-deposit states, with 72
percent of the U.S. population, the aluminum can recycling rate was 38.6 percent. Clearly, deposit states were and are recycling an
outsized share. The system works better than any other that has been tried in terms of recovery of materials, says MacBride. Trevor
Hansen of the Anheuser Busch Recycling Corporation named Michigan, with a 96 percent redemption rate, and California, with an 82
percent redemption rate, as two deposit states from which his company sources substantial quantities of aluminum. Redemption rates
in New York hovered at around 75 percent through the 1980s.
But it was a procedural loopholepermitting redemption without proof of purchasethat spawned New Yorks army of canners.
Although redeeming a container for another persons deposit is technically illegal in New York, the states rate of beer consumption
(fourth in the nation for beer shipments alone) makes the accuracy of redemptions a nightmare to verify. Legally speaking, were
talking about canners committing fraud at the most miniscule levels. Canners implicitly misrepresent themselves as other human
beings to gain access to small denominations of currency; its an issue of law enforcement faced by all deposit states. For example, in
2011, California boasted an incredible redemption rate for aluminum cansnearly 100 percent. But its redemption rate for certain
plastic containers was even more impressive: 104 percent. A+, a triumphexcept that this figure was the numeric equivalent of
growing a magic beanstalk from magic beans. For that four percent above 100, California had rewarded consumers in real money for
counterfeit behavior. Meanwhile, out-of-state canners drove Winnebagos and semi-trailers overstuffed with aluminum cans from
Nevada and Arizona, non-deposit states, to steal from Californias $1.1 billion recycling fund. Similarly, the state of Michigan, with a
10-cent deposit famously parodied in an episode of Seinfeld, loses $10 to $13 million a year in fraudulent redemptions, according to
the most recent estimates from 2007. In both of these instances, states are looking to catch out-of-state canners transporting
materials across state lines, running schemes not unlike Kramer and Newman with their mail truck on Mothers Day. Those in-state
professionals performing the same deeds tend to skate away with the nickels and dimes. Scale and quantity helps the practice of
canning thrive into the present day with minimal scrutiny. Its a profession that fosters informal agreements and unspoken
understandings.
Never a problem, as long as you do it nicely, said Eugene Gadsden, fifty-seven, the King of Cans in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Eugene redeemed his first can in 1983, which made him one of the original canners. The only way theres a hassle is if you make a
mess, he explains. Only the most egregious violators tend to be cited with city code, which imposes a $100 to $300 fine for crossing
into private property to remove garbage. Eugenes cousin, Jean Rice, seventy-three, also a canner since the 1980s, enjoys a warm
relationship with police in his preferred canning location: parking lot 13B of Yankee Stadium. The police captain there thats in
charge of the security, he kind of let us stay there, says Rice. Because we were kind of protective and a sort of ad hoc extra security.
In 2005, Picture the Homeless, a grassroots homeless advocacy organization, estimated that New York Citys 1,000 canners were
redeeming 12.7 percent of all beverage containers out of the citys population of 8.1 million people. Such a figure, though hardly
scientific, had astounding implications. Of New York Citys 8,099,000 non-canning residents in the year 2005, it would take 1.2
million people to replicate the same results as 1,000 canners. Comparatively, each canner on the street returned containers at 1,200
times the rate of the average New Yorker. These professionals stood like recycling giants among recycling ants, which made sense
because the average New Yorker didnt recycle as an occupation. Yet, with the deflating value of a nickel in consumer purchasing
power, redemption rates in New York State fell to record lows in the early 2000s. These lower redemption rates further supported the
refrain of bottle bill critics: The average consumer rarely makes use of this program. Canners, a tiny population of self-taught and selftrained recyclers, could only do so much to buoy the numbers.
Even so, statewide redemption rates for aluminum cans in 2004 (roughly 70 percent) far outpaced New York Citys curbside recycling
rate for aluminum cans (roughly 22 percent). But heres where we enter into a strange realm of recycling statistics, a virtual Oz of
obscure measurements: capture rates, diversion rates, redemption rates, container types, and container contents, each of which
somehow talk about recycling without talking about all of it. Any comparison between our state and local systems remains inexact
because state statistics account for the number of containers collected, while city statistics account for the weight of containers
collected. Neither program is eager to translate or record their numbers to provide a proper juxtaposition. State law and the city
curbside recycling program compete, essentially, for the same materials, says MacBride. So, they dont work with each other at all.
Theyre redundant, to a certain degree. It is akin to the Lollipop Guild refusing to sing in tune with the Lullaby League. Such a
straight-on comparison would facilitate the keeping of score for which system recycles its materials most effectively. Beyond that, no
national set of standards exists for the reporting of recycling data across industries, states and localities. The figures are mishmash,
and there is no Rosetta Stone.

In 2012, Ron Gonen, a Columbia Business School professor who looks like he should be handing out roses on The Bachelor, was
appointed New York Citys first recycling czar. He advocated for doubling the citys recycling rate to 30 percent. But he was moot on
how this increase would affect canners and was unavailable for comment despite repeated requests from July 2012 until May 2014,
when he resigned to co-found a $100 million private recycling fund. The larger question of how to get to 30 percent isnt going to be
made or broken by the deposit, says MacBride, as raising the rate would require a change in citywide habits for recycling not just
beverage containers but everything, including heavier items like steel appliances. According to the 20042005 NYC Waste
Characterization Studya study used to finalize a twenty-year exclusive contract with the citys scrap vendorif every New Yorker
recycles every scrap of material perfectly every time, the citys recycling rate would rise to just 36 percent. Plainly, curbside recycling
has its limits.

By the mid-2000s, an international consensus was building, driven by more than thirty years of container deposit data: U.S. deposit
laws needed an upgrade. A 2004 survey of 800 registered New York voters by Environmental Advocates of New York found that 70
percent supported an expansion of deposit law, and eighty percent agreed strongly or somewhat that curbside recycling alone
wasnt enough to control litter. California had expanded its deposit law in 2000, while Germany and Hawaii had implemented their
first deposit laws in 2005. In Scandinavian nations like Norway, where deposit amounts topped out at nearly 43 cents per container,
even the richest tycoons publicly stated that they recycled their emptiesbecause it was a matter of money. When the New York State
assembly moved to expand the bottle bill in 2009, similar legislation was being considered in Connecticut, Oregon, and Alberta,
Canada. After nearly a decade of lobbying from organizations like NYPIRG and the New York Farm Bureau, New York passed the
Bigger Better Bottle Law in April 2009.
The legislation broke what then-Governor David Patersons office called a nine-year logjam and extended the deposit to include an
estimated 3.2 billion water bottles sold annually in New York State. The new bill also mandated that the state retain 80 percent of
unclaimed container deposits, a windfall that had previously gone to distributors. Suddenly, bottle and can deposits represented a
source of revenue in a time of budget crisis. These deposits, previously held 100 percent by beverage distributors, provided the state
with an additional $354 million in revenue between 2009 and 2012$110 million in 2012 alone. In March 2013, the New York State
Assembly passed an additional deposit bill to streamline redemption logistics and increase the number of reverse vending machines at
grocery stores.
Since the early-2000s, Eugene Gadsden has been the de facto face of canning in New York City. His stories and insights are featured
in at least eight articles, a PBS Now segment, and a forthcoming documentary called Five Cents. You have to treat it like a regular
job, Gadsden said of canning in a 2006 story in The New York Times. Its a line of thinking he continues today. You are your own

boss, he explains. You work on your own terms. You could go wherever. You decide your income. Over the years, journalists made a
habit of portraying Gadsden as an example of the working poor making it work. Taken in totality, the pieces offered a reassuring
glimpse of New Yorks social chasms. Gadsden obliged, ever the optimist on screen or in the printed word. When PBS journalists
dubbed him the King of the Cans in 2007, he latched onto the title and carried it into the streets. He continues to hope that the
appellation will provide his life with a sense of notoriety and legacy. That original piece from The New York Times noted the rubber
bands that Eugene wore as penance on his left wristone for each week he hadnt smoked crack. As the article began to hint, Eugene
is a man of private demons and public talents.
The King of Cans rises from a sidewalk nap in a grey fishing hat. He rolls a cigarette with one hand and grabs a stray can for an
ashtray. Gadsden is a tall, lanky man with a youthful face and winsome grin. He smiles like a Pepsi commercial. Canners genuflect
where he treads, and I begin to understand why other journalists have pegged him as their main man. His eyes glisten, red and teary.
His slow vibe and Southern colloquialisms betray a Charleston upbringing. He speaks confidently but haltingly, with a stutter hes
displayed ever since his mother bowed out of parenting and left him with his grandparents. Hiring managers through the years had
assumed by his speech that Eugene didnt have the brains for the work. Gadsdens last job for an hourly wage was selling ice cream
from a hand truck in 1983. In fact, he first came into contact with New York canners while perusing the streets peddling Bomb Pops
and Creamsicles. Canning called to him as a vocation where no one could judge him, where his success depended not on what he said
but what he found. He lives by the rhythms of canning, says Drew Swope, a community advocate who spent a year on the streets
with Gadsden. He doesnt wake up and think its Wednesday. He wakes up and thinks cans are going to be out on these streets on
these days, so that must mean its Wednesday.
Gadsden sat with Sister Ana on the Canners Committee of Picture the Homeless, which successfully campaigned in 2005 for the
enforcement of redemption laws at grocery chains, with then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. On that same committee, Gadsden
helped push Albany to pass the 2009 container deposit expansion law. He was the first person to organize those communities, says
Swope. He wanted to be a leader, and he was a leader, in a lot of ways. Unlike the Pumas or other canners, Gadsden imposes few
limitations on his hours of work. Hell can on Christmas morning. Every can counts, he likes to say, tossing the containers into his
stolen cart. These ubiquitous, man-made objects have shaped his existence. He remembers when he was six years old, and John
Glenn became the first astronaut to eat in space using aluminum tubes. A year later, the Reynolds Metal Company manufactured the
first twelve-ounce cans, and Gadsden recalls rushing to a corner store for his first canned soda when they arrived in South Carolina.
How like the can is he as a grown manstrong, light and resilient, eternal in his work ethic, overflowing with niceties and yet born of
the worlds furnace. Eugene became well known for canning through the evening, working eighteen-hour days, pausing to feast on
cheeseburgers, and then resting through the weekends at his brothers apartment in the Bronx. Weaving his shopping cart through
traffic like a fish in a sea of whales, hell walk about ten miles per day on his routes through Hells Kitchen and Times Square. Between
workdays, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., hell chain up his cart and sleep outdoors. In his thirty-year career, Eugene taught the craft of
canning to more than 500 people. One couldnt say how many cans he has recycled in his lifetime, but his apprentices have redeemed
in the hundreds of millions. If we agree that recycling provides a social benefit, then Gadsden is the Johnny Appleseed of can cleanup.
A woman named Nadine is his current protg. Theres enough cans out there for everybody, he insists, picking a can from the bin
in a pizza parlor. The city provides.
In 2011, Eugene forsook Sure We Can for his old canning grounds at 33rd Street between 11th Avenue and 12th Avenue, near the
northern terminus of the High Line. This empty stretch of roadway runs between urban renewal construction and the Javits Center. I
give it bout two more years before we pushed out, says Eugene, citing a forecasted completion date for the Hudson Yards
condominiums. Then, I might retire, go back to Sure We Can. In my interviews with Ana, she expressed an eagerness to welcome
him back. With the No. 7 subway line scheduled to open a new stop at 34th Street and 11th Avenue, it was difficult to foresee the
neighborhoods newcomers tolerating a tent village. Five days before Christmas 2013, the billionaire mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg,
made a press event out of riding the No. 7 train to within a block of the King of Cans domain. This was a historic ride, said
Bloomberg, a mayor in his final days of office, a man of shrewd calculation who foresaw the extension of the No. 7 train as one of his
palpable legacies. A reporter from the New York Daily News noted how the new station was, eerily free of rats, graffiti, and litter
usually so common in subways. Just down the street was the place that Gadsden considered to be home. There, thousands of
afternoons, hed huddled against a concrete barrier and sorted his collection into neat, symmetrical piles. People see this cart loaded,
stacked up, and be amazed, he laughs, Theyre like, I never seen so many cans! Together with a colony of about thirty canners, he
would wait for a private redemption truck, a moving van that hed arranged to stop here about six times a week. At his peak, Eugene
earned $100 per day from cans. Presently, he nabs about $40 to $70. Some of that income funds his crack habit, a perpetual craving
that he tries to quell with prayer. When he loses his pipe, the King will puncture a hole in the body one of his cans and use it to clench
the crystalsteamrolling the smoke through the cans wide mouth. I think he gets overcome by a force thats bigger than his heart or
soul or mind, says Swope.

Eugenes daughter, Tasha, was two years old when her father plunged into canning. An irregular but loving presence in her life,
Eugene would lose touch with Tasha only to resurface briefly in person or mention her wishfully in news stories. In a 2006 piece for
The Columbia Journalist, Eugene said hed visit Tashas house in Harlem to cook her lima beans and chicken. At the time, he hadnt
seen her for five years. Its as if the eternity of cans warped his internal chronometer. In response to a 2011 news feature celebrating
Eugene and Sure We Cans move to Bushwick, Tasha reached out, posting in the online comments section, I have been tryin to find
my father eugene gadsden for 15 years, and then leaving her email address. Canning often leaves Eugene depleted. His hands ache
from grabbing all that aluminumjostling items and tying and untying knots in garbage bags to access the precious metal. He
describes sleep as a kind of hibernation. Im out to the world, he says. This lifestyle blurs outside reality and often buffers him from
family news. When Eugenes grandmother, Fannie Gadsden, died in Charleston in 1999, he missed her funeral by a week. That be a
whole lotta hurt, he confesses. When Eugenes wide smile regresses, he, too, disappears back into the anonymity of canners, a class of
people most couldnt distinguish in a police lineup. Sometimes, days be long, he says, and Ill be glad when its over. His shopping
cart crinkles as he turns a corner. Then, I start it up again.
Brewer, retailer, and distributor converge every two years at a loft party on West 22nd streeta fifteen-minute walk from canning
central by the Javits Center. Halfway between here and there are the studios of pop artist Jeff Koons, which Gadsden passes many a
morning on his way to Chelsea Park to unlock his shopping cart. Called The Taste of Great Brewers, this event gives retailers in red
badges the opportunity to connect and hang out with brewmasters and sales executives. Union Beer Distributors provide its brewers
with the venue, the customers and the means to close the sale through an iPad-app stationed on each of the 112 display tables. To
place an order, retailers tap their proximity-sensitive badges to one of the iPads and select the product and quantity of their choice.
Orders placed on the day of, Tuesday, November 12, received 10 percent off wholesale from Union Beer Distributors.
Sheehan hosts this soiree for 1,500 of his most influential accounts. It is billed as the most EXCLUSIVE event of its kind on the
invitation. I acquired a ticket through Sheehan as he walked me out of Union headquarters in Queens. As I stroll through the velvet
ropes flanking the Great Brewers entrance, a canner passes me on the other side of the street.
Walking up the grey staircase, I enter into the first of three floors where the cream of craft brewing await to offer tastings:
Narragansett, Magic Hat, Samuel Smith, Wurzburger, Hofbrau. Frank Sinatras Luck Be A Lady pipes through overhead speakers.
Waiters dressed in black rove with silver trays bearing sausage pates and miniature burgers. Blue accent lighting near the front
entrance blends with a pink sunset refracting off the windows. Restaurateurs in plaid suits and tight jeans and suspenders and fedoras
chat with brewmasters like Jamie Emmerson from Full Sail and Rod Tod from Allagash. A quick, 360-degree turn reveals twenty
beards.
Grabbing a souvenir snifter etched with a GB for Great Brewers, the name of Unions website, each guest wanders and mingles
across the floorshow. I could pick out the brewers among the crowd. There is something very guerilla about them, something
uncontrived and functional in their workman shirts, something very not New York City. They embody a group of craftsmen turned
businessmen, their eyes on the worlds largest market. Sheehan stands as the tannest man in the roomdignified in bearing as he
weaves among hands in a blue blazer. Even among this Whos Who in beer, brewmasters for whom hell distribute in perpetuity,
Sheehan emerges as powerbroker, king of conversations. Its magic watching him work. His children and grandchildren will inherit
this empire of contacts and contracts, an empire that, like the can, will outlive them.
Though most breweries at the event pour their wares out of taps and fine bottles, several differentiate by serving from the can: five on
the first floor, four on the second, four on the third. Indeed, breweries like Two Brothers, who serve beer out of several types of
containers, relish showing it off. Were very strategic about what beer we put where and in what vessel, says Leo Conaghan, sales rep
for Two Brothers, gesturing to the swirl on the can on his SickKick Extra Pale Ale. SideKick came in a can, explains Conaghan,
because the light-sealed container preserves taste in the hop-heavy brew, even as it jostled. SideKick can get to golf courses,
campsites, beaches, and wooded festivals and still taste as great as it should. At the booth for Oskar Blues on the second floor, the
Colorado brewerys entire portfolio glistens in twelve-ounce and tallboy cans. First to distribute craft in a can in 2003, Oskar Blues
has never bottled its products. You could say we started the can beer apocalypse, says Brendan McLane, Northeast Sales Manager
for the brewery. For McLane, the decision made financial and environmental sense. Better for our world, better for the beer, he says.
His company could ship 100 cases per pallet using aluminum, as opposed to fifty cases per pallet using glass. We definitely face the
bias that swill comes in cans, but thats what were here to prove: its what inside the counts. He pours out the golden suds of a
pilsner from a can into my snifter, the liquid glugging, and what I taste goes down smooth and satisfying.
On a booth on the second floor congregates a set of newcomers to New York. Representing Ballast Pointthe name an ode to their
brewmasters love of fishingthis brewery team had ventured in from San Diego. Chris Marin, a sales rep whod started his career in

the Ballast Point warehouse, eagerly shakes hands and pours a canned offering: Big Eye IPA. Weve got a real plan for this, says
Marin, who gestures with his hands and tosses his mane of hair. His voice sounds gravelly, good-natured, full of the revelry he sells.
We find the business nerds and match them up to the beer nerds, and its magic. The Big Eye quenches like a memory of something
pure, crisp, and cutting, like a sip on a bass trip with my dad in Wisconsin. The current production capacity of the Ballast Point
canning machine is thirty-two cans per minute, according to Marin, but the company had just purchased an industrial canner from
Dr. Pepper that cranks out 500 cans at the same clip. Expansion into new markets awaits, which meant shaking hands with more
distributors like Sheehan.
Marin, whos journeyed with Ballast Point to its current position among the nations top fifty largest craft brewers, still cant believe
that his company has made it to Taste of Great Brewers. Theyre stationed only two tables away from Sierra Nevada. Unlike the other
tiered systems of the alcohol universe, craft encourages the collapse of pretense. Brewing means brotherhood and sisterhood. Sierra
Nevada moves almost a million cases of beer per year, and yet here its people sit as equals next to startups and entrepreneurs. Like so
many enthusiasts in the craft scene, Marin idolizes Ken Grossman, Sierra Nevadas founder and owner. Ken Grossman, thats many
hero, man, says Marin, pointing to Grossmans photograph above the Sierra Nevada booth. But hes so cool about it. Its not a big
deal when you meet him. Hes just a person.
When a bar for financial traders and Sex and the City people opens across from my building in East Williamsburg, I transplant to
Bushwick. There, I walk my Cairn Terrier twice a day to a dog park not two blocks away from Blue Star Beverages. One morning, I
decide to check in on the redemption center, maybe thinking Id run into the Pumas, though Id seen on Facebook that Manuel had
found other work in construction. As I approach, I see that Blue Star had closed this location, perhaps favoring its two mobile
redemption centers. In its place is a full service photo-and-film production facility. Renamed LightSpace, the buildings skylights and
twenty-eight-foot ceilings serve as visual palettes for set designers and fashion photographers. Vogue, Bentley, and Puma (the shoe
company, not the family) have already booked shoots with them. Where models pose in the room billed as Studio A once sat
crumpled metal that workers shoveled into heaps not ten months earlier. The other world has eaten them all. The wide, cavernous
door, once beckoning canners, now gleams shiny and commercialshut to the world except for brief periods of loading in equipment.
I feel lonely standing there: the only person who remembers when this building was a shrine to aluminum. Down a few streets, a For
Sale sign hangs in front of Sure We Can. A buyer has offered Sister Anas landlord $3.9 million for the property, despite its
foundations above the L train. I walk away from LightSpace. The Empire State Building towers across the East River, and I feel pride
looking at it. I relate to the pharaohs of this world more than Id like to think. My lifestyle consumes localities. I am a money mouth. I
am white and make money, and I move places. Wherever I go in Brooklyn seems to displace something genuine. Everything changes
around me, except for the can.
On a random Saturday, Eugene strolls into Sure We Can and puts on a volunteers apron. Time has blurred again. He recognizes none
of the people bagging cans or working the forklift. Has it been months? The place needs a canners touch, he observes, particularly the
bottle mountain swallowing a walkway. He sweeps around his feet. For years, hes clung to the cash value of the only eternity made in
a human factory. In the world of cans, Eugene is lord and master, he knows, but so are bigger men like Sheehan. Beer makes royalty of
every stratum: the King of Cans, the king of beer distribution, the King of Beers. All this confuses him, and he cant say if its good or
bad that he trained all those canners to hold up a pyramid of labor that yielded riches for men hes never met and whose fortunes
didnt trickle back downwards. Any answer feels too complete, like a childs answer, a verdict on his life and the whole human
business of making tools to make things a little easier. After all, if we created the can, and the can is eternal, then the can reveals us.
Eugene saw himself in it. And there were so many cans now that he couldnt recognizegolden Oskar Blues Pilsner, fish-headed
Ballast Point. Perhaps his reign has ended. He has these moments of self-realization, explains Swope. And hes like, Oh wow, there
are people around me that really care about me. Like the can, he cycles in and out of darkness, always hopeful that the next
redemption will be final.
Ana drops a bag of cans she is carrying, losing her count as she bee-lines for Eugene. I didnt know how I was going to be accepted
back, he admits. He looked ravaged. His injured left shoulder, untreated for years, has hardened into a hunch. A cyst protrudes from
his forehead. A month before, hed lost his I.D. and wallet. Yet, he smiles at her with resilience, like the dandelion growing through the
cracks in the concrete. Ana just hugs him. It is the hug you save for your lost brother. Thank you, she says, to the man who left her
alone to run the redemption center. This had been their dream: a home for street canners, for the people who truly had nowhere.
Perhaps this will be his moment to mend things. But they both knew hes had other such opportunities. He needs to email Tasha.
Needs sleep. Needs to get to Church of the Holy Apostles for a provisional I.D. But first, he tosses a can in the air. And it seems to
freeze there for a second, long enough to consider. He walks back into the world he built.