“It’s worth it,” says Vanessa Breen, who collects the rubbish to exchange for cash. “But you have to be quick, and you have to want to do it.”
“It's very hard. It's really, it's a head game as well. Not easy,” Vanessa Breen said on Monday evening as she searched the city centre for plastic and aluminum cans to exchange for cash later.
So far this evening though, she was doing alright for herself.
Breen made her way down a row of black and green bins that lined the north kerb on Stephen Street Lower. A short ways down the block, the afterwork crowd sipped cocktails at wooden picnic benches outside Caribou.
Breen pulled out blue and white trash bags swiftly. She untied them and methodically shuffled through, grabbing plastic bottles and aluminum and tossing them in her bag.
She said she has to be fast to make money, there’s a lot of competition.
“I open the bags and then I close the bags. Don't make a mess. Clean up after. That's it,” she said. “Put them back the way I got them.”
She ties a trash bag back up and tosses it back in the black bin with a performative shrug. Look, you’re going to get dirty, she said, wearing a black hoodie, ripped jeans and sneakers.
Breen says she won’t touch the bags that aren’t in bins – the ones that make a mess spilled out on the sidewalk and become a meal for seagulls.
A small trash truck drove by as she worked and the bin man called out to her, to make sure she wasn’t ripping them.
“No, I don't do that! I don’t do that man,” she shouted back. “Wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me!”
She recognised him, and said she assumed he knew her too and that she doesn’t make a mess and that’s a reason he didn’t linger.
She likes the new trays that Dublin City Council has been installing on the outsides of bins, for people to put their bottles in so collectors like her can just grab them, instead of digging around in the bin. It saves her time, it’s just great, she said.
Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose said there needs to be more of these bottle-collection shelves added around the city.
“They've added more in recent weeks and that's good to see,” Jose says. “They're needed everywhere in the city centre and in urban centres outside the city centre, especially near shops.”
“However, it's been over 18 months since the deposit return scheme was introduced and we now have these holders on just 120 city centre bins,” Jose said.
Dublin City Council says it has more than 3,000 public litter bins. Its press office has not responded to a query about its plans for rolling these shelves out across the rest of them.
Breen said she started collecting as soon as the Deposit Return Scheme rolled out at the start of February 2024. Several other collectors said the same.
The scheme means that 15 cents or 25 cents is added to the price of aluminum cans or plastic bottles, but that money is returned when the bottle is brought back and deposited in a reverse vending machine.
Breen said she, like many others, saw the opportunity – she can work her own hours, hone her own strategies, no resume needed.
She’s practiced at moving quickly, knows what works, what doesn’t. Has an eye for the cans that can’t be cashed in – imported Diet Cokes and Coke Zeros. Sighs at large plastic bottles with the labels ripped off, that would’ve been worth 25 cents.
“I don't do it for nothing. I do it for something,” she said. “So I want to get something. Because I need it. You know, suffering with addiction is very hard. I see this. This is better than sitting out of a shop.”
Ireland’s recycling rate for plastic bottles and aluminium and steel cans has risen from 49 percent to 91 percent since the introduction of the Deposit Return Scheme, according to the Re-turn, a company set up by drinks producers and retailers to run the scheme.
In 2024, “the scheme saw 877 million drinks containers returned”, according to Re-turn.
The promised returns motivated some people to take advantage of the bottle-cash binned by those still choosing to not partake in the recycling scheme.
Breen said she gets to know the people who collect and there’s a lot of variation there, it’s not just the homeless. Families, people waiting on their next paycheque.
There’s the people who are really good at it – she said the biggest hitters around are an old man and this younger lady who routinely haul big bags up to the Lidl on Aungier Street.
Breen said she collects a lot too, all day sometimes. It’s a lot of work, she says. “Especially if you walk far, you know. Have to keep going, going, going. Because there's an awful lot of people doing it now, you know?”
Today wasn’t the easiest for Breen, she says.
She lost her keys last night, plus she’d hurt her ribs earlier this afternoon after jumping into a skip at the back of Grafton Street for finds. But she keeps moving now – it’s 7pm, a good hour for recycling.
She has her regular spots, and what times are best to visit them. She’s tried working with others, but has settled on working alone.
“They only get what you want out of you, and then they're gone,” Breen says. “Because you know where these are,” she said, pointing at her full bag.
Her Lidl bags with bright yellow bananas were filled, so it was time to head up to Lidl to cash them in. Walking up Stephen Street Lower she passed an alley lined with bins on either side, but she didn’t check them.
“I don’t do this bin.” she said, continuing towards Aungier Street. “Because they’re someone else's."
On her way up the busy city-centre sidewalk, she automatically weaved over to check each bin, grabbing the last finds of the haul on the way.
At 7:15pm, there was a short queue with collectors with big bags forming at the reverse vending machines at Lidl,.
One of the machines was out, the other was stuck. A shop employee came, hauled away a large container stacked with crushed plastic and aluminium. The line got moving again.
Lidl and Dunnes, they have good machines, Breen said. She said in her experience, “Everytime I go into Tesco’s they never have the machines working”.
She said when the machines don’t work, people get frustrated. “It’s mad. I've seen killings at machines for this.”
It’s competitive, and people have mental-health issues or kids, they're desperate for money, they’ve not been finding any. She’s had her bag robbed off her multiple times.
She said sometimes you’ve walked a long way for the machine, or are at the front of the queue when it goes out.
“I'm not perfect, you know?” Breen said. “I mean, I have my nights that I snap. It brings an awful lot out.”
After returning her haul, and collecting a receipt from the machine, she cashed in the receipt at the till: €11.75, for about an hour’s work, at peak time.
Now Breen heads back out to find more bottles and cans, walking towards Drury Street, checking bins along the way.
There’s a yellow bin just down from Ciss Maddens pub – she gets a water bottle out. She says this is her favorite bin. She says she doesn’t agree with the effort to stop on-street drinking here on Drury Street.
“These are the people that help us,” she says, gesturing to the traffic-free roadway, often filled with young people.
She passes a bin with a tray on the outside, which has spots for individual cans, and she grabs them out rhythmically, passing quickly, and starts drinking a Four Loko that still had some left.
When Breen got to Dunnes to cash in another bagfull, Adrien Balan was lingering outside the Exchequer Street entrance, waiting for the queue at the machine to die down to cash in his own large clear trash bag, filled with bottles and cans, up to his shoulders.
No it’s not a lot, Balan said. “I had five of these earlier.” And smiled.
He is calm. He has a new girlfriend, Sam Murphy, who he was waiting for, and he was just down the road to where he lives, in a tent on South Great George’s Street.
Murphy emerged up from Dame Street, and Balan bit the bullet, and went in to join the line at Dunnes to cash out.
Murphy said they’ve been dating for three weeks. “He provides for us,” she said. “He’s great at it … And his face, wow. He’s so cute.”
He was done for the day after that, and the two went off to enjoy the evening.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
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