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Personal Narrative-Recycling Room

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Personal Narrative-Recycling Room
Between Grand and Clinton Street, Fine Fare Supermarket's fluorescent-lit bottle-recycling room reeks as though it had been soaked in warm beer. With my four-year-old sister trailing behind me, our shoes sticking to the syrupy ground, I was ten when I started my waste work career as a "canner," zig-zagging across Chinatown and the Lower East Side dumpsters. I sifted garbage for Cokes and Coronas and stacked them into my collapsible shopping cart. Ripping a small hole in a garbage bag to retrieve a Poland Spring, I tried to cleanse the grease off my hands. It was futile.

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