Partly thanks to freelance canners, around 80 percent of aluminum produced in the United States comes from recycled aluminium products.
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. That's how the country achieves an 80 percent recycling figure.
In New York City, 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 others, this is how they earn a living.
Josefa 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 estimates that, on a very good weekend, she and her husband 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 told Canary Media, “but this gives us stability.”
Workers like Marín 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.
Making primary, or virgin, aluminum is extremely carbon-intensive. Giant smelters consume inordinate amounts of electricity - typically derived from fossil fuels - and the process is responsible for the vast majority of the aluminum sector’s climate footprint, which amounts to 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions every year.
Making secondary, or recycled, aluminum is a much cleaner operation by comparison. Gathering scrap, melting it down, and molding it into new products or parts uses only 5 percent of the energy needed to make primary aluminum, resulting in dramatically lower emissions for the repurposed material.
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