A meditation on collecting cans and bottles.
By Berenice Leung
I used to associate the jangle of bottles and cans with animals. The sound evoked mammalian scavengers—squirrels by day or raccoons by night, rummaging through trash.
But after eight years of living in New York and San Francisco, I’ve learned that this particular clink-clank-clatter more often signals the enterprise of older humans, not critters, reaching into waste bins for empty beverage containers. They proceed with job-like determination—and their collection efforts do, after all, get rewarded, typically at five cents a pop.
Across the 10 states with “bottle bill” laws, eligible containers can be redeemed at recycling centers for the cash deposit paid by the original consumer. Occasionally the influence of these laws reaches across borders: A friend recalled his college years at Ohio State, where non-students often descended on off-campus housing to pick up cans after parties. Ohio doesn’t have a bottle bill—but driving roughly three hours north from Columbus got you to Michigan, where empty cans fetch a coveted 10 cents apiece.
Nevertheless, such cross-state arbitrage seems like a hard way to earn one’s daily bread. But maybe there’s more to it than money. That was certainly the case for me, when I was a student at Penn.
In 2014, while my freshman dormmates joined groups like the Penn Society of Women Engineers, the Onde Latina dance troupe, and the Wharton Undergraduate Consulting Club, I chose another direction. Banding together with peers known variously as Waste Watchers or Eco Reps, I gloved up and got ready to divert garbage across three bins—Recycle, Compost, Landfill.
We stationed ourselves around big events like the Philadelphia Marathon, Penn Relays, and home basketball games at the Palestra. As spectators streamed by bearing single-use containers, I tried to make myself useful. “Your coffee lid? Recycle!” I’d affirm. “Wait—that cup’s compostable!” Just your typical, friendly trash patrol.
If items still landed in the wrong bin, then manual correction was required. My arm became a claw machine, descending into the blue Recycle bag to retrieve wrappers belonging in the black Landfill bag, dropping plastics from green Compost into blue Recycle, or some other permutation. Anything saucy—especially ketchup-smeared trays of half-eaten fries—demanded extra care.
I will readily admit that this was not my most glamorous extracurricular. Yet I felt satisfaction doing it, all the way through senior year. Every event ended the same way: the fruits of our labor (to reduce landfill volume) visibly bagged, and the magnitude of post-consumer waste made concrete as I grasped it with blue-gloved hands.
Even after graduation, working in the renewable energy field, I stayed mindful of proper waste disposal—and the myriad obstacles to it. Once a coworker and I peered into a three-holed bin bearing the familiar labels—Recycle, Compost, Landfill—and admired our workplace’s eco-minded design … only to laugh ruefully after observing that just a single large bag spanned the space underneath. Or take San Francisco, where I am constantly passing sidewalk trash cans topped by a distinctive toroidal shelf etched with recycling symbols. They suggest, as an enthused Waste Watcher would, “Empty bottles and cans go here!” Yet my own enthusiasm drops upon witnessing my discarded kombucha bottle roll through the center hole and plop into the trash below.
Picking bottles and cans from trash is, as I see it, a last-ditch effort to salvage materials that might actually be recycled. It’s an uphill battle to curb litter, reduce marine debris, and break wasteful patterns. But lately I’ve wondered: Do the can collectors of San Francisco share this view?
“I have this crazy curiosity project idea that I wanted to float by you,” my friend Drew [C’18 W’18] messaged me one day. But it didn’t sound crazy to me. So, prepped with our multilingualism and open minds, we met on a Sunday afternoon in Mission Dolores Park, where can collecting is as common as picnics on balmy days.
The first person we approached was facing the opposite direction while sifting through a trash can (maneuvering around that tricky recycling shelf) at the park’s edge.
“Hello,” Drew said as we walked closer.
The man turned around to reveal his round, sanguine face, emitting a soft “Hola.”
Despite my inadequacy in Spanish, I could make out my friend’s introduction and mirrored the man’s wide closed-lip smile with mine. He and Drew conversed about the man’s family members in El Salvador, his varied work to support them, and his life in the Mission neighborhood. The gathering of these small details added up to something less tangible but somehow more palpable than the weight of the cans in his sack. It was there in the man’s eyes: the flicker of light that comes when people truly see one another.
We next spoke with a Chinese woman who was walking among groups of parkgoers to collect cans freshly drained of beer, hard seltzer, or sparkling water. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a face mask, and nitrile gloves, she projected a preference for social distancing—yet from the moment of greeting her, she walked closer and responded with warm tones of Cantonese.
She lived in Chinatown with one college-aged daughter and one unpleasant son-in-law who was withholding unsigned divorce papers. She had some family nearby, some far away.
“My older daughter has left,” she said to me.
“Oh really?” I replied. “Where did she go?” It took only an instant for me to realize my misinterpretation. Her other daughter hadn’t moved to a different neighborhood; she had died. Tears started to dampen her light blue mask.
“What’s a young woman like you doing, talking with an old person like me?” she asked. Then she gestured toward her bag of cans. “If I’m not out here, what else is there to do? What do I have to live for?”
I was overcome with the desire to answer her question. What did any of us have to live for? The sun beaming down upon us. The health to stand and walk. All the good people surrounding us. I tried to translate my mental gratitude list into spoken Cantonese.
When my words faltered, I hugged her. She, foregoing the light back pats we typically save for strangers, embraced me earnestly, impressing hand contours on opposite shoulders as our hearts drew closer. I had not predicted our conversation ending this way.
Neither of the people we met mentioned money or environmental sustainability. Both spoke with Drew and me without hesitation, even though it took away from their collecting time. When I offered the woman a beverage from a nearby cafe, she politely declined.
Having set out to learn what motivated a few San Franciscans to collect cans, Drew and I instead heard the life stories of two people who have lived far longer than either of us. The enjoyment of one another’s company put me in mind of what had originally drawn me to recycling initiatives and kept me engaged. Which was a sense of community, and perhaps also of community-mindedness. My memories of waste sorting were saturated with friendships rooted in school, work, and volunteering.
Talking with a pair of strangers in Mission Dolores Park yielded nothing of any statistical significance. It was a sample size of two. Nevertheless, I left the park with a different lens on the gathering of bottles and cans. Yes, they could be redeemed for a little money. And yes, the act of recycling may constitute a small kindness to our environment.
Above and beyond those things, though, another value emerged that day from bringing together what otherwise scatters. Plastics, metals, and glass clang upon being bagged together. The sound resists an immediate, outward harmony. But listen closely and you can hear the resonance—the echo chamber—of our innate draw towards human connection.
Berenice Leung C’17 W’17 is a sustainability and wellness professional.
