Pawel Krasicki had been working the fry station at a restaurant in John F Kennedy International Airport when his father’s cancer diagnosis made the rigid hours of restaurant work impossible. Like many Americans struggling to care for a sick parent, Krasicki, a Polish immigrant, found himself in need of supplemental income. That’s when he turned to “canning”: collecting aluminum cans and plastic and glass bottles and redeeming them for a return value of usually a nickel. Then he got laid off.
“Canning is the quickest way you can get a fast dollar, you know, the honest way,” Krasicki said. He started collecting cans full time, and found himself constituent to the roughly 8,000 canners in New York City alone who support themselves recycling beverage containers. But the nickel he received in return used to buy a lot more.
“I used to see that fresh money and be like, ‘oh, that’s cool,’ but now it’s not enough,” Krasicki said. “We’re protesting for the five cents to go up to ten cents, and, you know, but it’s been like beating on walls with nobody listening.”
As the nickel has lost much of its purchasing power since the establishment of the New York State Returnable Container Act of 1982, recycling in the United States has waned to its lowest rate since statistics started being tracked in 1990. Canners like Krasicki, environmental activists, and even some in the aluminum industry are lobbying to change that—with the future of American aluminum manufacturing at stake.
While beverage containers pile up in landfills and canners like Krasicki must work more for less, the downward trend in recycling has caused a mounting crisis in American aluminum. The loss of precious aluminum from bottles and cans is squeezing an industry now defined by scrap production.
Scrap accounts for 80% of American aluminum production, up from just 20-30% in the 1980s. While consumer prices have nearly tripled since 1982, scrap aluminum has quadrupled in value. Aluminum cans, known in the industry as “used beverage containers,” account for about 20% of that. But that share could be significantly higher if fewer cans ended up in landfills.
Cans pile up around the United States, but proponents of “bottle bill” legislation argue recycling could double by increasing incentives. (Photo by Keyian Vafai)
The Container Recycling Institute, a recycling research and advocacy non-profit, says that legislation to expand recycling deposit return systems around the country and bump return values from a nickel to a dime in the ten states with such systems currently in place could more than double aluminum recovery from 37.2% to 85%.
“The whole point of a deposit is that it’s an incentive,” said Susan Collins, the institute’s president. “And so if the incentive is bigger, the action is bigger, if the incentive is smaller, the action is smaller. And that’s it in a nutshell.” Collins pointed out that in states like Connecticut, where the deposit doubled from a nickel to a dime in 2024, recycling rates nearly doubled in just a year.
That boost in scrap supply would ease pressures cast on manufacturers by aluminum prices that have surged particularly in the six weeks since the Iran War began, due to Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for 8% of global aluminum output and 21% of US primary aluminum imports. In late March, an Iranian missile struck Aluminum Bahrain, while Emirates Global Aluminum declared force majeure this week, meaning that manufacturers will see limited output from two of the world’s largest aluminum producers for the foreseeable future.
The Aluminum Association, an industrial trade organization, says that the value of aluminum cans is in their relatively-unique capacity for quick, closed-loop recycling—recycling where the recycled product is infinitely recyclable back to its original product, as opposed to open-loop recycling in which, for example, a plastic bottle is converted into carpet and less likely to be recycled again. An added plus is its relative purity, compared to scrap from automobiles with contaminants like steel, other metals, and plastic, meaning it requires less extensive processing.
Scrap may not replace freshly made “primary” aluminum, but when scrap runs low, manufacturers are forced to use costly primary aluminum instead. “Aluminum” is often an umbrella term for various aluminum-containing alloyed metals that are not industrially interchangeable. While primary aluminum requires the energy-intensive process of smelting—extracting aluminum from raw ore—recycling cans only requires “remelting”—shredding and melting aluminum in a furnace, which uses about 5% of the energy.
“You know, you think about an auto body sheet or aluminum that goes into a building, that might take 10, 20, 50 years, but we’re turning these beverage cans over sometimes as quick as 60 or 75 days,” said Curt Wells, the senior director of regulatory affairs and corporate stewardship at the Aluminum Association.
The association’s 2024 performance indicator report says that 96.7% of recycled beverage containers are remade into cans, “an indicator that the industry is using nearly all of the cans it has access to in order to make new cans.”
A coalition of stakeholders like the Aluminum Association, Container Recycling Institute and redemption centers like the one Krasicki uses, Sure We Can, have been partnering with state lawmakers in crafting and advocating for “bottle bill” legislation. Some bills create deposit systems in states without any current bottle laws, while others raise deposit refund values from a nickel to a dime and increase handling fees paid out to redemption centers. 81% of Americans support the programs, with some states like Connecticut and California already succeeding in raising return values.
But not everyone is on board. The National Waste & Recycling Association, a recycling trade group, argues that bottle bills “destabilize recycled commodities,” and that curbside recycling is more effective. Supermarket interest groups rail against state regulation that requires grocery stores meeting certain criteria to process container returns for customers.
The American Beverage Association and its state associations have opposed bottle legislation wherever it has been introduced around the country. In New York, the association became the tenth largest lobbyist in the state, in part from fighting New York’s bottle bill, introduced and reintroduced each year since 2022, only to languish in committee. While higher bottle collection could make beverage companies a pretty penny with the rising cost of scrap, they already make 20% of every unredeemed can, with the remaining 80% going back to the state—meaning they stand to benefit from less recycling.
Canners sorting their hauls at Sure We Can, a non-profit recycling redemption center in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by Keyian Vafai)
“They’re incentivized to keep the system inefficient because it generates money. The more stuff is not redeemed, the more they generate,” said Ryan Castalia, Executive Director of Sure We Can. Castalia said that the current deal distributors and the state get is good enough for them to spare the hassle of investing in a more widescale recycling program that could earn them higher profits. But New York Public Interest Research Group expects that the bill would actually increase revenue for both the state and distributors, since the doubled deposit value would account for the revenue lost to increased redemption.
The beverage association did not respond to requests for comment.
Bottle bills first blossomed in state legislatures as part of a larger movement of environmental awareness in the 1970s, starting with Oregon in 1971, followed by Vermont, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, and Massachusetts, with the wave concluding with California in 1986. Well-funded beverage and grocery lobbies then organized to oppose these measures, leading to a 16-year gap until Hawaii passed the last state bottle bill in 2002. Delaware repealed their state’s bottle bill in 2010, and has one of the lower recycling rates in the country. In addition to the ABA and NWRA, other beverage companies like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, and Pepsico have lobbied against bottle bills since.
As in the 1970s, even today, of the 300 groups across New York that Sure We Can works with to lobby for bottle bill legislation, the majority are environmentally oriented.
“These greedy companies… are not taking no responsibility for the recycling part,” Krasicki said. “Instead, these containers end up in the landfills. They end up in rivers, they end up in sewers. Let me handle them.”
The Aluminum Association called for an export ban on all beverage scrap exports last October, stating that improved recycling could close 25-50% of the US metal supply gap and save $2 billion a year. The report, published prior to the war, also stated that primary aluminum is crucial for defense production, like tanks and fighter jets, and “increasing the domestic scrap supply would free up more primary aluminum to support the American warfighter.”
Besides incentivizing a precious industrial metal, the bills could transform the lives of thousands of canners around the country. Some canners, like Krasicki, are well aware of the metal’s rising price, even saying he heard a rumor that some canners remove the tabs atop cans in order to sell them by the pound.
“Aluminum is going up, so come on,” Krasicki exclaimed, adding that doubling return values would give him breathing room in an increasingly unaffordable city.
“That extra money would help me feed my dog, feed myself, help me get this stuff that I need for the home. You know it would be such a big difference, is what I’m saying.”