This Millennial Is Putting Herself Through School by Collecting Cans

Katie Gee Salisbury
5 min readJul 29, 2016

On the streets of New York City there is an underground economy of sidewalk hustlers. If you look closely enough, you’ll see it: wannabe rappers handing out CDs, carts selling homemade churros and fresh-sliced mango on a stick, kids doing pole routines in the subway for a few extra bucks, and then there’s always the can-collectors sifting through yesterday’s garbage. Among this assorted riffraff you’ll find Carita, a 21-year-old double majoring in psychology and nursing at Hunter College.

Carita is no stranger to hard work, but unlike other college students, her resume doesn’t include fancy internships at well-known companies or institutions. Instead, she has been working afternoons, nights, and weekends to support her mom, and put herself through school by collecting cans on the streets of Lower Manhattan — a grueling job that is usually relegated to the homeless, immigrants who lack the English language skills necessary to find other work, retirees no longer collecting an income, or the otherwise bedraggled.

Her day starts at 5:30 a.m., which gives her just enough time to make it to her first class at Hunter. From 7 a.m. until noon she’s in school, then after lunch she heads straight to the day’s pick-up neighborhood. The mother-daughter pair operates like a well-oiled machine. Each week, she and her mom make the rounds: Monday they’re in Union Square, Tuesday they’re downtown, Wednesday they’re back in Union Square, Thursday they go ‘uptown’ to Chelsea, and so on. They stick to a set schedule and maintain contacts in many of the large buildings they collect from.

Together, they work quickly, picking up about 2,500 cans and bottles a day. At 5 cents a piece, that translates into roughly $900 a week. On average, they haul in 72,000 cans a month. Do the math and that adds up to 864,000 cans a year, which means they pull in nearly a million cans annually.

Can-collecting is a territorial business. Fights break out over buildings flush with beer bottles, bags of cans left unattended are quickly stolen, and collectors often resort to bullying and guerilla tactics to…

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Katie Gee Salisbury

Author of NOT YOUR CHINA DOLL, a new biography of Anna May Wong, forthcoming from Dutton on March 12, 2024. Available for pre-order: www.notyourchinadoll.com