SURE WE CAN INC
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Mission Statement
Sure We Can's (SWC) mission is to serve independent recyclers, also known as “canners”--those who collect and redeem bottles and cans to earn income under the NY State Bottle Bill–through economic empowerment, social inclusion, and environmental awareness.
About This Cause
SWC was founded in 2007 by canners, for canners, in order to mitigate the daily burdens of stigma and the logistical challenges common to canners’ work. Despite their incredible contributions to sustainability and waste diversion in our communities, canners remain among our society’s most marginalized members. Sure We Can aims to recognize the enormous impact canners create, cultivate safe space where canners’ welfare can be protected and their needs met, and where they can build a supported, sustainable community in peace. There are an estimated 10,000 canners across NYC, and Sure We Can today provides a financial lifeline to over 1200 individuals within a 3-mile radius of the East Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, as well as canners from across NYC who make the journey to access its services. The community of canners is overwhelmingly composed of an intersection of underserved and marginalized demographics, including undocumented immigrants, non-English speakers, people experiencing homelessness and/or disabilities, women, and the elderly. Most don’t have access to the benefits and protections of traditional employment. Our work lies in ensuring canners receive fair pay for their work, opportunities to grow in their job and their lives, opportunities to advocate to institutions for improvement of their conditions, and above all, dignity, support, and belonging. Sure We Can offers diverse programming, representing its efforts to engage with sustainable culture not just through recycling and organizing, but community gardening, upcycling, arts, and education, while simultaneously deepening its capacity to provide outreach and support to the community–a need made more stark by socio-cultural events like the COVID-19 pandemic or the current influx of asylum seekers to New York City, which expose the gaps and challenges canners face in accessing institutional resources and other forms of aid and support. These long-term efforts combine to strengthen Sure We Can’s mission to fight for social equity, racial justice, environmental consciousness, and economic empowerment for marginalized communities across Brooklyn and all of NYC. Each year, Sure We Can's work results in over 13 million bottles and cans being recycled that would otherwise wind up littered, or clogging our landfills and waterways. The work of canners at large addresses deep issues around plastic pollution, the waste crisis, and climate change. The work of canners and Sure We Can, in addition to diverting hundreds of thousands of tons of waste annually, is also a mechanism for environmental justice, distributing much-needed income into deeply underserved neighborhoods while simultaneously cleaning up those same communities. Canners experience significant obstacles associated with earning a supportive livelihood while bearing the burdens of marginalization of stigma. Practical challenges include redemption centers going out of business due to institutional neglect, as well as difficulty in managing the needs of the work itself, such as access to storage space, availability of PPE, or reliability of sensitive, transparent, and consistent service. Sure We Can seeks to address the full spectrum of canners’ needs, even beyond just recycling service, including advocating for the legal framework that governs canners’ lives to be transformed through expansion of the Bottle Bill, as well as advocacy on the local level to create more empowering and inclusive conditions for canners, and to transform broader cultural perceptions of canners and waste work in general. Through organizing, outreach, and community development, SWC works to address the stigma associated with canning on a cultural level, and the corresponding isolation and obstacles workers experience, creating conditions for canners to be recognized by their peers, public entities, and officials, through meetings, rallies, press events, and mutual aid networking. In addition to the broad stigmas and barriers canners face as a community, Sure We Can faces logistical and operational challenges unique to this sector of work. In order to provide consistent and accessible service to canners, Sure We Can must navigate a chaotic regulatory landscape around redemption activity, including inconsistent pickups and payments from distributors as well as cash-flow obstacles associated with lack of updates to the law, which creates a precarious economic environment for all redemption centers. We also face intransigence and inaction on the part of elected officials and institutions on the city-, state-, and national-level, among whom canners and their work are often ignored or deemed disposable. All of Sure We Can’s work and programs are dedicated to overcoming these obstacles, both on the granular level of providing sensitive and accessible day-to-day service, and the broader level of seeking transformations of systems so that they prioritize canners’ needs, commensurate with canners’ essential role in NYC’s waste diversion and litter mitigation system, and cultural life at large.