A look inside Syracuse’s can recycling industry
A look inside can recycling in Syracuse
Employees and residents offer a glimpse into organizing thousands of cans a week.
When you walk into Western Lights Bottle and Can Return in Syracuse, the first thing you notice is an indescribable smell — tangy, sweet and strong. It’s the aroma of stale beer and ultra-sugary soda mixed and left to sit for years at a time. It hits you in waves and soaks into your clothing. It’s the kind of smell that makes you want to wash your hands.
Then you meet the workers, many of whom are outgoing and happy to chat, while others are quiet and keep to themselves. All of them, though, never stop moving as they carry bags around, load trucks and count and sort an army of cans.
Ed Perry works for the Tomra recycling company. The Tomra semi-trucks trucks arrive at bottle returns early, sometimes before 8 a.m. When asked what time he starts working, Perry said “too damn early.”
The true scale of the operation is tremendous. Hundreds of cans per bag, hundreds of bags per truck, more than one semi-truck a week. The warehouses and stockrooms are piled wall to wall, floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of aluminum cans.
Chrystal Carlberg is the manager at four recycling centers around
Syracuse, including Western Lights. She estimates that each center
processes somewhere around 40,000 to 50,000 cans a week, combining for over 10 million cans yearly.
In 2016, across all of New York state, there were roughly 4.76 billion returned to recycling centers — around 70% of all the aluminum cans sold in the state. At a nickel fee per can, a whopping $238 million in redemption fees was paid out to recycling centers and to customers.
Bags stuffed with recyclables sit inside the JMA Wireless Dome at Syracuse University on Sept. 30 after the Syracuse football team lost to Clemson. After the game, SU ROTC students collected the bags of recyclables and loaded them into a bottle return truck.
The students describe themselves as volunteers, but one mentioned that volunteering is “strongly encouraged” and “hard to get out of.”
Zoran G. has worked at 5¢ Bottle Return for over a year and hardly ever has to check which brand of can goes into what bag. Often, he doesn’t look before he throws, having memorized where each bag is.
The aluminum cans he counts will go into a tube and be launched into the back. He’ll throw 2-liters into a waiting bin behind him. Glass bottles are then passed to Michael Barkley, who drops them to a steel bin where they explode with an incredible bang.
James “Jay,” who declined to give a last name, walks up and down roadways collecting cans to be recycled. He cracks jokes easily and says he doesn’t mind the hard work of collecting cans — only the rats he has to contend with.
Tomra employee Gus Oselmo is quiet and polite. He works with his headphones in, preferring music to the deafening rattling noises that echo within the semi-trucks.
He’s going into his third month with Tomra after a stint working nights at Amazon, which he says was an impossible schedule to keep up with. He doesn’t mind the early hours with Tomra but complains about the cold weather.
is a photographer for The NewsHouse.