‘People see rubbish, but I see money’: the professional recyclers cashing in on Australia’s bottles and cans - The Guardian

‘People see rubbish, but I see money’: the professional recyclers cashing in on Australia’s bottles and cans | Recycling | The Guardian

Sitting on a milk crate outside Sydney’s Wynyard station, with a plastic poncho, a cardigan and a beanie to stay warm on a bitter night, Tepyanee waits.

It’s getting late; if she has to wait much longer, she risks missing the last train home and getting stranded – it wouldn’t be the first time. Last week she missed the last connecting service home and remained on the platform overnight until the first train at dawn.

Just after 9pm, after two hours of waiting, a station guard parks the first of a dozen garbage bins by the kerbside.

The 71-year-old pensioner, who prefers to go by her nickname Tepyanee, jumps to her feet. She will spend the next two and a half hours rummaging through the station’s bins in search of empty bottles and cans.

This is how Tepyanee supplements her pension, saves and helps her son pay his mortgage: trading each bottle or can for 10c each through the NSW return and earn scheme.

Professional recyclers such as Tepyanee have become a familiar sight and sound across the country; people pushing shopping trolleys full of bottles from house to house, clinking bottles being fished out of recycling bins, huge bags of cans tied to dolley trolleys swooshing and dragging through city streets.

“It’s not easy collecting cans, it’s not too hard, but it’s not easy,” she says, tearing open a thick plastic bag – full of food scraps and a few stray cans – inside the first bin.

It’s a typical night for the Thai expat who has collected cans and bottles from the station nearly every night for the last two years after losing her restaurant job during Covid-19 lockdowns.

Some time ago, a friendly station guard would regularly take the bins out as early as 5pm so she could get home at a reasonable hour. But now he works at Town Hall station, says Tepyanee, which has fierce competition from other can collectors. She comes to Wynyard station every night because other collectors don’t bother her here. It’s her territory.

As her bags slowly fill with bottles, intoxicated men occasionally stumble by and hurl abuse at her. Tepyanee keeps her eyes fastened to the inside of the garbage bins, and the provocateurs move on.

At one point a man on his way home from work drops a steaming serve of Pad Thai and can of soft drink by her feet. Later, another stranger does the same with a small bag of fruit. Tepyanee stops work and accepts each gift with a smile.

“Some people talk negative to me”, she says, unfazed. “Others are positive.”

Each night Tepyanee collects roughly 400 cans and bottles worth $40. Including her hours-long journey back to her home and waiting for the bins to be emptied, that’s no more than $8 an hour. She used to make over $60 each night, but now she says other collectors are taking bottles directly from the bins while they are on train platforms during the day.

Dr Rebecca Taylor, an environmental economist at the University of Sydney, knows Tepyanee and other like her as “professional recyclers” – an informal workforce of low-income earners, pensioners and people looking for supplementary income that scavenge waste streams for bottles and cans to make money through recycling incentive schemes.

“From an environmental perspective, it’s great to see this resource – that’s often-considered waste at the expense of the environment – is given a value,” Taylor said.

From a poverty alleviation perspective, however, Taylor says the system is not what policymakers would aspire to. “It has a positive unintended consequence of transferring money to those who are worse off … but if you were designing a policy to help low-income individuals, you would choose a different policy.”
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A few suburbs west, James – a father of one who works in emergency services – has a different tactic in mind: yellow bin night, when household recycling wheelie bins are put out on the kerb for collection the next morning.

“It’s like an addiction. You just can’t stop because it’s free money. People see rubbish, but I see money,” James says, who agreed to an interview on the basis his name was changed.

James first got into collecting and recycling cans five years ago as something to do with his 10-year-old son but now goes out searching after work alone.

“It was something we could do together, you know, father and son, go out and collect and make some money,” he says, “But now, he’s a teenager, he wants nothing to do with it.”

“Once I finish work, I’ll go from 4pm until nine or 10 o’clock at night nonstop, going around in circles in my area collecting cans.”

Professional recyclers have become such a fixture in the area that many households put their bottles and cans in a milk crate beside their yellow bin, saving James from digging through every bin.

Once his station wagon is bursting with cans, James drives to a so-called reverse vending machine in Marrickville – one of the more than 600 return points dotted across the state – where he receives a tax-free 10 cents into his bank account for each can or bottle.

“I normally do $1,500 a month, that’s my target, but then I did $2,000 last month which was awesome,” he says.

In the last five years, James claims he has collected more than 360,000 drink containers, or $36,000 on top of his steady full-time wage. He plans to give it all to his son when he turns 18.

Since the return and earn initiative was introduced to NSW in December 2017, more than 9bn drink containers have been refunded across the state, equating to $900m in refunds – more than $42m of which has been donated to charity as recycling centres give participants the option to donate the 10c refund.

Once Victoria launches its own version of the scheme later this year, every state and territory in the country will offer its own cash-for-cans scheme, which have been heralded with diverting waste from landfill and increasing recycling rates.

The NSW scheme reports recovery rates – the percentage of material that enters circulation and is recycled each year – of more than 65% of eligible drink containers, well above the national averages of materials such as plastic (18%) and glass (63%). In South Australia, where the initiative began in 1977, the return rate of containers is 77.5%. The proportion of bottles and cans in the state’s litter stream is also the lowest in the country.

Recycling rates and uptake of deposit refund schemes can reflect broader trends in the economy, says the environmental economist Bevin Ashenmiller.

“When the economy is bad, there are fewer bottles and cans out there and there are more people looking for them,” says Ashenmiller, who studied a similar scheme in California that launched in the mid-80s.

From a survey of 660 people in 2009, Ashenmiller found roughly a third of material collected by the California scheme came from professional recyclers, many of whom were from low-income migrant households similar to Tepyanee. The remainder came from households and businesses who recycled bottles and cans that they used themselves.

Ashenmiller also found petty crime rates were, on average, 11% lower in US cities that hosted the scheme compared with those that didn’t.

In NSW, 66% of adults have directly participated in the scheme at least once, 16% of which return cans at least once a week, according to survey results of 1,000 people released under the Freedom of Information Act. In Tepyanee’s area in western Sydney, the return rate of drink containers per capita is more than double that of Sydney’s wealthier suburbs.

“Maybe I’ll go back to working in a restaurant, a bit more money,” Tepyanee chuckles, preparing for the long journey home as she fastens the last bag of cans to her dolly trolley at 11.30pm. Tonight was a good night, she estimates 450 cans – $45 once redeemed – and she’ll make the last train home.

“I have some money … but I don’t like to stay home and do nothing … If you do nothing, you get nothing,” she smiles. “I love doing something.”