<
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-aluminum/cans-to-car-parts-inside-the-complex-crucial-world-of-aluminum-recycling>
"On a muggy summer day in an industrial stretch of Brooklyn, New York, Josefa
Marín stood in a sea of empty aluminum cans, methodically sorting the tall
green Heinekens from blue-and-silver Red Bulls and bright red Coca-Colas. She
put the different brands into separate garbage bags, filling each one up with
exactly 144 beverage containers. All around her, mountains of bags crackled in
the glaring morning light.
Marín is one of the thousands of independent “canners” who comb through New
York City’s detritus to salvage many millions of cans, plastic bottles, and
glass containers every year. Canners earn 5 cents for every unit they redeem
under the state’s bottle bill. For some people, collecting is a way to bring
home extra cash. But for many like Marín and her husband, Pedro Romero, this is
how they earn a living.
“I started doing this little by little, but then other work opportunities began
drying up. Now I do this 100 percent of the time,” Marín told me in Spanish. We
spoke in late June under the shade of a plywood awning at Sure We Can, the
nonprofit recycling center where Marín organizes her cans for beverage
companies to come pick up.
In cities across the country, informal waste pickers are filling in the big
gaps left by formal recycling programs: Americans throw away an estimated $800
million worth of aluminum drink cans alone every year. Canners help to keep
significant volumes out of landfills, in turn reducing the need to produce
aluminum from scratch.
Marín, who is 54, moved to New York nearly 40 years ago from her home in
Puebla, Mexico, and has been canning for the last two decades. She estimated
that, on a very good weekend, she and Romero can collect some 20,000
containers, earning about $1,000 for the haul, plus a few hundred extra dollars
for sorting and bagging the cans.
“I’m not going to be rich,” she said, “but this gives us stability.”
Workers like Marín and Romero represent a crucial link in the complex supply
chain for aluminum recycling — one that begins with hands-on collecting and
extends all the way to multimillion-dollar factories, where old car doors and
building beams are melted down into fresh material. This vast network plays an
increasingly vital role in limiting the carbon dioxide emissions that come from
making the ubiquitous metal."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/create-the-right-conditions/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
