Every day at 7 a.m., Graciela Cieza and Robert Romero, a Peruvian immigrant couple, open the doors of the warehouse where they have their recycling center in Queens, New York. It is a small business where they collect cans and bottles to exchange them for money.
New York State's fragile recycling ecosystem for bottles and other materials is run largely by immigrant workers and seniors who earn roughly $30 a day as independent recyclers...who have not seen an increase in the value of the items they collect in the last 15 years.
In the past two years, 150 of the state's roughly 700 redemption centers have closed because they are no longer profitable, according to the New York Public Interest Research Group.
The man who owned the redemption center before us closed because he declared bankruptcy...we have been working here for eight years, and five months ago we became owners of the business.
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