All the time I see people with huge shopping carts full of recyclable bottles and cans. I assumed most of these people were homeless, but then I started to wonder if people could make a living from recycling bottles.  It turns out you can’t… but you can make enough to eat and from what I can tell that keeps a lot of people from having to rob people to survive and keeps proud people from having to beg for money. They can actually work for it.

I wanted to talk to these people to find out more, but I didn’t really have a reason.  I had been talking to my friend Brendan Sullivan (DJ VH1) for a while about doing a project together after reading his private blog. His writing is outstanding and we have similar tastes in adventure.  I pitched him the idea for interviewing the bottle collectors of Alphabet City and then we pitched the idea to Vice.  They dug the idea so we went out all day once a week for about a month to talk to these people.  We found out a ton of stuff, and had some adventures.  Vice is publishing our tale on their blog every Tuesday in March.

Check out the first part of the story here.  It’s mostly an introduction, it gets progressively more interesting.

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