Recycling Greenpoint, One Bottle At a Time

They know the neighborhood by its vices, by its thirsts. They go through your trash, they clear your stoops, they scour your parks. They track your life, drop-by-drop. And then they collect here: in the windy, gritty strip of lot shaded by the BQE. Above, cars rumble off to better places. Here, there’s the sound of clink, clank clack, thwock as bottles bang into a heap of their brethren.
Caddy-corner from Beverage World, on Manhattan and Meeker, are those people who have gathered the neighborhood’s recyclable goods and have come to reclaim the 5 cent buyback fees promised by the State. It’s a good gig: Anyone of the seven who have gathered here on a Tuesday morning have at least 200 bottles each, and three of them can afford to share a house together on Manhattan Avenue. The maintenance of the operation required Beverage World to hire a full-time employee—Virginio Aspiroz—who while the front half of the store makes its paycheck in bottles filled with something, makes his trade in bottles filled with nothing.
According to the 1982 New York State Bottle Bill, any store that sells a brand—Budweiser, let’s say—is required to buy back, at 5 cents an empty, any amount of that brand. Because whoever bought the original can of Bud paid a 5-cent extra deposit fee, unreturned bottles meant an extra 5 cents per sale went to the company, such as Budweiser. The more people who return to collect the money, the more money goes toward the community. But this month, New York State voted to adopt the “Bigger Better Bottle Bill.” Whereas once the deposit-buyback scheme affected only “carbonated beverages”—your beers, spritzers, and sodas—as of June 1st it will include water and juice bottles, about 80 percent of unclaimed bottles. The unclaimed deposit money will no longer go toward the company but will now go into state coffers, generating a projected $115 million per year.
Sounds great. But it could be a headache for stores like Beverage World—privately owned businesses which have found themselves fulfilling what the state seems to have covertly outsourced to them. Especially in the past two or so years of a down economy, more people have been flocking to Beverage World with carts and carts of cans which must be sorted by brand, loaded on to pallets, stored somewhere, and finally when the brand comes to reclaim them, raised into trucks with a hi-lo tractor. Rick Fertel, co-owner of Beverage World, isn’t getting a dime for any of that work. “You could deter them,” Fertel said, “But I’m here, I have time, I take them back. It’s green. It’s good for the environment.”

Still, he admits, from a business standpoint doing such makes no sense. Legally, any store—big chains like RiteAid—for instance, should take back the same brands that they sell. But they never do. “Most people try to make it harder. There’s no money being made.” So it falls to the little guys. And the cost he puts into collection—keeping a warehouse of dirty empties that must be deloused regularly and keeping up a staff to deal with the intake of hundreds of thousands of empties per week keeps his prices up. “If I flip through a newspaper and I see RiteAid selling Coke and Pepsi cheaper than me, I’m mad,” says Fertel. It’ll get even worse when the water bottles come in. Still, Fertel says, “We’ll keep doing it. It’s good for the community.”
On a typical day, waiting outside Beverage World for the 10:30 a.m. count-up and load-up are about five to ten people who make their living off these 5-cent paychecks. Today, there are three women from Ecuador—one a mother and a daughter—a man from Mexico and four from Southern China. In China and in much of the world, it falls to the lowest class of society to clean streets and sort rubbish. They’re paid by weight of the load they bring in. In America, immigrants who don’t speak English are certainly in our lowest economic sector—and so to them falls the job of recycling. Most of the workers here are here because they can’t do anything else. Still, it’s good money for labor that isn’t half bad.
Virginio Aspiroz, the manager hired by Beverage World to oversee the recycling operation, was born speaking Spanish and, because he immigrated to Greenpoint, learned Polish as he learned English. To communicate with the Chinese workers who bring in bottles, he uses hand gestures and a sort of pidgin. “The challenge is really the language,” Aspiroz said from atop a forklift in the vast 7,000 foot warehouse.
Outside, under the BQE, sorting the Maneschewitz bottles over which families celebrated Passover or the beer cans over which nervous future lovers first spoke, no one is speaking.