Here’s yet another unconsidered consequence of the pandemic: It’s boom or bust time for the guys who live off your empties.
“I’m collecting three times the amount of bottles since the COVID-19 outbreak,” says Tyler Harris. The cart he tows behind his motorized wheelchair is filled to the brim.
The story might be grimly different for those who pick from other patches, who rely on refundable beverage containers from now-shuttered bars and restaurants, but for Harris, who sticks to a residential route, the past month has been phenomenal.
He has a routine: Once every two weeks, he heads out when the evening recycling bins are taken to the curb. (The CRD asks people not to put refundables in blue boxes, but they do it anyway.) On the off-weeks, he picks up returnables from the homes of Esquimalt clients who ask him to do so.
Except where it used to take one day to collect from the latter, it now can take three. When his bottle-laden trailer comes clanking down the street, people he has never seen before come running from their houses, waving bags of empties. “That has happened a lot since COVID.”
It’s not that people are necessarily drinking more — the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch says sales spiked in the last two weeks of March, but then returned to normal — but that they’re doing it at home now that they can’t go out.
Also, some of the places that used to accept returnables — grocers, government liquor stores — have suspended doing so while trying to adjust to our suddenly altered reality.
Harris, 42, could teach us all a lesson about being blindsided by adversity. In 2004, he was a healthy, active young man — working at Mr. Lube, cycling, sailing — when, out of the blue, his life turned upside down.
He was at the movies one day — Shrek 2 — when he began to feel a chill. That night, it got worse: nausea, diarrhea, leg pains so bad that he had to crawl to the kitchen for a glass of water. Then he fell and hit his head. When he regained consciousness, dark spots began forming on his arms. He called 911.
Harris had bacterial meningitis, and ended up in a week-long, drug-induced coma. His family was told he probably wouldn’t survive.
He did, but at a cost: Doctors had to amputate his legs below his knees and remove parts of his fingers to save him. Just like that, his life had changed.
Fast-forward five years. In a wheelchair, not doing much of anything, Harris figured he had better do something to cover the cost of his daily luxury, a morning coffee from Tim Hortons. So he turned to picking up bottles, something he had done in his youth.
As it turned out, bottle collecting brought in more than coffee money — good thing, seeing as his disability payments barely cover his rent and a couple of weeks worth of food each month.
“The bottles pay my bills and provide me with the food I need to eat,” he says. They also feed his dog, Autumn, his constant companion of eight years, the one with whom he hikes the region’s trails on his shortened legs. Harris even saved up enough for a kayak, which he tows behind his wheelchair to the Gorge Waterway. Sometimes, he drops a crab trap.
“For me, it’s not just bottle collecting,” he says. “It’s survival.”
The problem is, with so many people losing work, competition has emerged. Harris went out one recent night only to discover that a couple of women in a van had cleaned out all the blue bins.
“Many people are using their vehicles to collect,” he says. That puts established collectors, most of whom don’t have cars, at a disadvantage.
It’s also bad form to poach from someone else’s trap line. “A true bottle collector will stay out of another bottle collector’s route.”
Delivering Esquimalt empties has also become a bit more arduous with the Ellery Street recycling depot temporarily closed (its operators hope to reopen it in mid-May). Instead, Harris tows his cart, which weighs 325 pounds when fully loaded with glass, to the Bottle Depot on Queens Avenue. He can hang a dozen bags of cans off the sides, and add five plastic garbage bags of plastics — water and pop bottles, juice containers — to the top, too.
The Bottle Depot also runs operations on Glanford Avenue and Quadra Street in Saanich, but it’s the one on Queens that downtown pickers rely on. The others are a long haul for anyone on foot, particularly if they’re carrying glass bottles, not cans, says Jutta Gutberlet.
Gutberlet is a University of Victoria geographer who works with local waste-pickers through something called the Diverters Project.
Note the name: Some pickers prefer the name “diverters” to the traditional “binners,” she says, as they see themselves as diverting recyclables away from the garbage dump. “They see the role they can play to make the city cleaner.”
The volunteer-driven Diverters Project tries to improve the lot of pickers, finding economic opportunities — contracts with apartment buildings or festivals, say — and removing the stigma attached to the guys who poke around town for bottles.
Gutberlet, who also has experience working with pickers in developing countries, worries that COVID-19 is leaving many of them vulnerable.
If Harris has been doing fine, the same can’t be said for pickers who frequent downtown, or who comb parks, beaches and other places where people used to gather to drink. “Many had informal partnerships with restaurants,” Gutberlet says. Much of what is collected normally comes from dumpsters that are no longer being filled. Not now. And while many municipalities have bylaws that say you’re not supposed to pluck stuff from recycling bins, the reality is those usually provide a lot of refundables, too.
At the same time as revenue streams dry up, competition from newcomers has increased as jobs disappear, disrupting established patterns. A 2019 assessment of Victoria pickers found 40 per cent of the 50 people surveyed had been doing it for more than 10 years. “Many of them are doing this as their main occupation,” Gutberlet says.
Most don’t have the option of stopping. Nor do those who spend their days in the streets have the same access to hygiene as they handle other people’s discards. “They don’t have money for hand sanitizer.”
The Diverters Project has been offering them advice on how to protect themselves.
At the Bottle Depot, chief operating officer Adam Boswick echoes Gutberlet’s message about the role pickers play in keeping refundables out of the garbage dump. With small beverage containers now fetching 10 cents, and ones over a litre bringing in 20 cents apiece, it’s nuts how much returnable, reusable material goes to the landfill, he says. If you don’t want the money yourself, at least save your refundables for bottle drives, or stick them in one of the Bottle Depot’s 60-plus charity bins around the capital region, he says.
Boswick speaks of customers for whom collecting such items is “obviously a key source of their income, especially during these hard times.”
Hard times are something many are getting used to, their lives suddenly upturned, just as Harris’s was 16 years ago.
“Some people would hate the world if it happened to them,” Harris says of his experience, and the way he reacted to it. “I’ve never been a ‘poor me’ person. I can’t change it, so move on.”
