MAKING A LIVING ON EMPTIES
The city’s bottle-collectors say their hard work pays off — in cash
A small woman, dressed smartly in a patterned windbreaker and a beige bucket hat, leaves her house at dawn several days each week with bungee cords, a push cart and fabric sacks. Like hundreds of other scavengers in neighbourhoods across Toronto, she fills them slowly with empty bottles and cans by digging through recycle bins and searching the alleys behind restaurants.
“It’s just exercise,” says the woman, who doesn’t want to use her name. It can also be hazardous. “Some [homeless] people spit on me,” she says in Cantonese, with friends chiming in about times they’ve been attacked and robbed of their recyclables.
But she does it anyway, always ending up at the Beer Store at Bathurst and Queen to cash in her collection, with a long lineup of others who’ve often worked all night to do the same.
The Ontario chain of Beer Stores paid out more than $178million in deposits on 1.78 billion empties last year and it’s clear that many of those empties were not returned by the people who bought them. For some it’s rent money. For others, just a hobby.
“The government wants us to recycle,” says the woman in the beige hat while sorting more than 100 bottles by colour. “All my kids went to university, they have office jobs. My son is always saying ‘Why are you picking out of garbage bins? Aren’t you embarrassed?’
“It’s not embarrassing. I have so much free time, why wouldn’t I do something that makes a little money?
“Maybe one day I’ll spend the money I save on a vacation.”
Her hobby defies a city bylaw that theoretically prohibits rummaging through residential garbage and recycling bins, but city staff say the rule is rarely enforced.
The woman says h o meowners never get upset with her c ol l ec t i ng and even o ffer
her money, which she refuses to accept.
Elizabeth Allegretti sees it all the time. She lives in the neighbourhood behind the Queen West Beer Store and says she often finds people scouring her backyard for empties.
“They should wait until garbage day,” says Ms. Allegretti, adding that bottle collectors have damaged her manicured bushes on more than one occasion. “If I’ve already put it to the curb, I don’t mind. Otherwise it’s very disrespectful.”
The steady flow of seniors with carts and bags of bottles continues throughout the day at
Maybe one day I’ll spend the money I save on a vacation
the Queen West store — far outnumbering the buying customers.
One cashier works through the lineup, darting back and forth from the counter to the back room with boxes of empties.
“[Bottle collectors] are literally outside the store all day,” says one Beer Store employee who works at another downtown location but asks that his name not be used. “They never buy beer. You know all that money is going into savings and probably paying their rent.”
Regular re turners at t he downtown locations have established a set of protocols, to ensure they don’t waste time. There is an honour system and regulars know to give the exact number of empties they have, so staff don’t have to count every can.
“It’s like respect for the employees. They sort it properly because they know they’re going to get yelled at if they don’t,” says the employee, who has been working as a store-front staff member since 2007.
“They’re very specific about how much money they get. They calculate it. They know they’re supposed to get $25, so if you give them $24 you’re going to get into a fight.” The worst is Sundays. “On a Sunday when you get to work at 10 minutes to noon, it’s like Woodstock out front. A couple of weeks ago, I was on the empty till. For five hours there was a lineup out the door and I stood on that till for five hours pushing buttons.
“It’s a huge nuisance for customers, because a guy comes with his 12-pack and just wants to buy another 12-pack and there’s a lineup of people with 30 bins each. For the beer store employee, you’re standing behind the counter and you have average customers glaring at you.”
In 2007, the province rolled out a new program that expanded the Beer Store’s return policy to include liquor and wine bottles from the LCBO. The introduction of a deposit program for wine and liquor bottles — worth 20¢ apiece instead of the regular 10¢ for beer bottles and cans — spelled a viable source of income for some.
A man who gives his name as John has been collecting since the implementation of the Ontario Deposits Return Program.
Wednesday is garbage day at a nearby condominium on Richmond Street and John has an arrangement with the building’s superintendant.
In the morning, he helps move the garbage bins to a nearby alleyway 100 yards away. He spends an average of two hours separating the trash from the valuable glass.
“Every floor of these condos throws out $20 worth of alcohol bottles,” John says. “They just go to the dump if I don’t get them.”
He doesn’t bother going from house to house sifting through curbside blue bins.
“It’s too much work,” he says. Instead, he has deals with bar managers and condo custodians who leave bins out for him one night a week.
He makes $46 in one visit to the Beer Store on Wednesday. When he is done, he uses the broom fastened to his shopping cart to clean up shards of glass leftover from the sorting process. It is these little details, he says, that keep locals from hassling him.
While sorting bottles outside the store, he collects the drops of vodka in the bottom of bottles, but says it is not for him.
“I’ve been sober for 27 years. I give this to one of the alcoholics on my block ... It’s one less person drinking mouthwash.”
John says he was recently denied social assistance payments he was receiving as part of a work program because his bottle collecting was not considered a job.
“I told them, ‘If it’s not a job, how did I save up $2,000?”
He speaks of his most profitable days like fishing stories. On a recent evening, John says he made $291 when he stumbled across a restaurant under renovation where workers had stacked all the empties on the back patio.
For a veteran of bottle picking who has grown used to sorting through garbage to make ends meet, it was the catch of a lifetime.