by
Ambi: clinking and traffic
. It's close to midnight, just in front of the Church of the Intercession in West Harlem.. On the sidewalk, a few people sort cans and bottles they've brought on their carts.
Ambi: clinking up full for a second, then back down.
The streetlights glow the orange of old sodium lights. On the grassy patches in front of the church, thousands of bottlecaps half-buried in the dirt glint like discarded constellations. The men and women sorting glance up the street every so often, looking for one particular truck.
Ambi: Truck pulling up (up and then under narration)
Alex Guevara pulls his converted U-Haul to a stop. The letters hand-glued to the driver's door say "Recycle," In one practiced motion Guevera maneuvers the truck so his tires kiss the curb.
[AMBI door latch clanking]
He opens the back of the truck and puts out a yellow traffic cone. Night-time recyling is open.
[AMBI of exchange, negotiating, greetings]
Alex, who's originally from Ecuador, pays people here 3 cents for every can and bottle they bring him -- that's little less than they'd get from supermarkets during the daytime. Alex says he doesn't have many competitors.
AX: Alex
In the daytime, you see a lot of people buying, but at night, there's only a few. I'm one of the few.
So Alex shows up, seven nights a week, with his truck, making just three cents on every can and bottle he buys.
During the day, a case of 24 bottles gets you a dollar-twenty. At night: you only get 70 cents ... sometimes a bit more. There's a little room for negotiating. In return for some scrap metal and a bag of cans, Alex offers Lisa, one of his regulars, five dollars and fifty cents.
AX: Lisa (0:13)
Alex: five fifty.
Lisa: Six dollars!
Alex: ... alright, I give you six.
Lisa: I've known him for a long time.
There's a casual, friendly kind of feel to these late night gatherings, but the lives of many who rely on Alex for income run close to the edge. A lot of customers, like Lisa, come to Alex they've got a need to fill.
AX: Lisa
SO WHY NOT WAIT UNTIL MORNING, FOR THE SUPERMARKETS TO OPEN? Because we drink, we smoke. I'm not going to lie to you.
Alex figures that two thirds of his clients are addicts of one kind or another... They're dirty, some of them, and unwashed -- /they/ can't make it through the front door of some supermarkets, so they come here, instead.
Some stores have machines out /back/ to redeem cans -- but the machines run slowly, and people might have to wait for hours. Instead they spend that time collecting more cans.
Some of Alex's other customers are just busy during the day, and go out collecting as a sort of night shift.
AX: Alex (0:15)
Retired people, People on SS, immigrants, legal, illegal, man woman, decent person, people into drug, all kinds of race doing this business. It's an honest dollar.
Addict or no, a lot of people here, don't want to give their last names- a few years ago, a can collector told a reporter that he'd made 50 thousand dollars in the last year, and mentioned it was "tax free." Shortly afterward, a city tax collector tracked him down for tax evasion. Everyone's been a little bit cagey, since then.
There's nothing illegal about this kind of recycling operation -- it's been a source of income to people all over the city for decades, now. It originally started as an environmental measure in the early eighties-- The state estimates that about two thirds of deposit bottles and cans sold every year get redeemed, most of them by street-level collectors like the ones Alex buys from overnight.
AMBI: Duck to silence, then come up with car radio inside the truck cab
The next morning, with the truck half full, Alex stops at 178th St and Audubon to buy more glass and cans from a man with only a small truck, who himself has been buying overnight.
AMBI: clinking and loading.
AMBI: sounds of bags of cans and muffled shouting from Will.
Because Alex makes only three cents per can or bottle, every single can counts.
Alex's assistant, a guy named Will, squeezes everything possible into their truck: all 199 cases of bottles. He pushes bags full of cans into every possible space.
To the untrained eye, Alex's truck is full of one thing: "recyclables." But to Alex and Will, there's a hierarchy in the back of the truck -- glass is king. Cans, come next. Plastic is the ugly stepsister.
Glass is best because Alex buys it from people after they've grouped it by brand -- Coronas with Coronas, Presidentes with Presidentes, and so on. No sorting required -- just unload and collect the cash. Cans are easy, too; most of them get mushed in together when it's time for recycling, so Alex gets paid right away for those, too. Plastics, though, come in all shapes and sizes -- it's a headache for recycling centers. They need to arrange them, which requires time and labor, so there's usually a day or two lag before Alex gets paid for plastics.
AMBI: closing the truck
Will shoves one final bag into the truck, and closes it. At last, it's off to the Bronx.
AX:Alex
Yo, when you open that door, it's all going to fall on your head, you watch your head. (chuckles)
Alex and Will work incredibly hard, often seven days a week. Alex pays rent in Inwood, -- Will generally sleeps in the truck -- and they are both out on the street, lifting, sorting, cajoling, for 12, sometimes 14 hours a day, split into two grueling shifts.
Will is keenly aware of how outsiders perceive him. He says he'd gotten a rotten look from someone on the street, last night.
AX: Will
Parents tell their kids, there's a bum. But they don't know what a bum is. We don't beg nobody for nothing, we don't ask nobody for nothing, we buy our own clothes, we survive on the street. A bum is somebody who begs… we don't beg.
Will seems proud that he's worked his way into the middle of this chain of commerce, no longer at the bottom, like he used to be. He once was one of the collectors, but now, Alex pays him a wage every day, and he's got someplace to be. Being poor, or even homeless, and being a /bum/ are very different. Having been both, Will bristles when he's taken for what he's not.
AMBI: street tone to indicate street scene
We pull up to a brick warehouse in Hunts Point, on the southern side of the Bronx. A sign on the wall says "DRC Group."
There's a smell in the air like an old bar on a summer day,- old beer, old soda, crushed plastic. The smell of good times now gone past.
AMBI: faint motors of forklifts, Alex bringing over the skids comes up under the Narr.
DRC group buys glass, cans, and plastics from people like Alex. They in turn sell directly to bottlers, distributors, and other companies. They spend as much as one hundred thousand dollars a day, buying loads from middlemen, like Alex. and in turn, DRC makes a tidy profit when they in turn sell their materials.
AMBI: generalized stacking and cli nking
Over the course of the next hour and a half, Alex and Will sort the jumbled contents of the truck into stacks. They're leftover clues to northern Manhattan's nightlife: for those who drink beer from the bottle, Corona is clearly most popular, followed closely by Presidente, Heineken, and Guiness. Will and Alex build the piles seven cases high - just a little over Will's head.,He starts wrapping the stacks with industrial plastic wrap.
AMBI: Awesome sound of stretching plastic wrap.
While Will wraps, Alex cashes out. Then a man driving a little forklift scoots over and carries the stacks inside inside,.
AMBI: Forklifts up full
Michael Vaitzman, one of the partners in the DRC group, keeps an eye on all the motion in the yard. It's tough times for many businesses across the nation, but Michael says that for him, the economic slowdown actually helps.
AX: Michael
DOES THE RECESSION HURT YOU GUYS AT ALL? Recession is better for me. More people unemployed, they go to collect cans. This is like one of the articles of surviving. Good times, bad times -- People will always drink, people will always collect cans.
The economics of the system are the same at every level -- sell the product for more than you bought it. Alex, back at the church, paid three cents for every can. He sells it to the Russians here in the Bronx for almost six cents a can -- nearly doubling his money. The Russians turn around and sell to the bottler for eight cents a can, making less per can, but in huge, huge volumes.
Vaitzman says that DRC pays a little more, even, than the machines at supermarkets. That's one of their selling points.
AX: Michael
But the machine has a limit - $12 a day. Or the machine doesn't take all variety. We take everything, unlimited. If someone comes to me with 5 trailers, and its good stuff: I take it.
DRC Group is growing - Vaitzman says they've got a staff of 300 people, and plan to hire more. He and his partner started the business a little more than a decade ago. They had five thousand dollars and an idea that they could buy and resell recyclables in volume. Today, Vaitzan leans on his Lexus, parked right outside the office. He's near the top of an economy which began some twelve hours ago with people pushing clinking carts of cans and bottles down a city street.
AMBI: clinks and sorts,
Adam Hirsch: Columbia Radio News.