Mark Gutman/Daily NewsCanJam Bottle and Can Redemption Center owners Jeremy and Erin Sparks, center, with son, Layne, 2, and Genesee County Chamber of Commerce President Brian Cousins, cut the ribbon on Tuesday morning.
Mark Gutman/Daily NewsCanJam Bottle and Can Redemption Center owners Jeremy and Erin Sparks, center, with son, Layne, 2, and Genesee County Chamber of Commerce President Brian Cousins, cut the ribbon on Tuesday morning.
Mark Gutman/Daily News
Mark Gutman/Daily News
Mark Gutman/Daily News
Mark Gutman/Daily NewsCanJam Redemption Center owners Jeremy and Erin Sparks in their new business.
Mark Gutman/Daily News
Mark Gutman/Daily News CanJam Bottle and Can Redemption Center owners Erin and Jeremy Sparks sort through some recent returns.
CORFU — There’s still some work to be done inside CanJam Redemption Center, located at 9 E. Main St., behind Brittany’s Booze Barn, but the relatively new business has been accepting recyclables from customers for about 2 1/2 months.
Erin Sparks and her husband, Jeremy, are the owners of CanJam, which pays cash for the cans and bottles customers bring back.
CanJam Can & Bottle Redemption Ribbon Cutting on Tuesday March 7, 2023.
“We did all the painting. We still have quite a few projects that we need to do underway. Every day, we’re working to improve,” she said. “Every day, we’re looking to find something else that we can make better and make it more functional.”
One thing they’ve done so far is move part of the counter from one place to another to make it longer along one wall and have a sorting table.
Aside from the room in which soda cans and other recyclable items are kept and sorted, there is an office, Erin Sparks said.
“This is brand-new for us — first-timers,” she said of the location, which opened Dec. 20. CanJam and the county Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting there Tuesday.
Erin Sparks said when her husband’s uncle opened a redemption center she helped with some of the advertising for that location.
“Other than that, our first time counting cans was Dec. 20,” she said with a laugh.
There were a couple of reasons the Sparkses wanted to open CanJam on East Main Street.
“One, we really wanted to give back to the community and have something that was a little more rewarding in our lives,” Erin Sparks said. “The other reason is, daycare’s really expensive. I don’t have to pay for daycare anymore. We can bring the kids to work with us on the weekends and stuff.”
Erin Sparks said for now, she and Jeremy run CanJam.
“He has landscaping and snowplowing that he does on his own,” she said of Jeremy Sparks. “This is kind of like my little gem here and I’m just building before he has to go back to his original job, to make everything functional and easy for when customers come in. It’s quick, it’s efficient and it’s clean.”
As far as the benefit of a redemption center in the village, Jeremy Sparks said the community likes it.
“They would have to go to Alden or Batavia or far away to do this,” he said.
Erin Sparks said, “I’ve also heard that people enjoy the fact that we are open specific hours and it’s pretty reliable that we are here during that time.”
Ryan Petersen was the one who did a lot of the work to set up the inside of CanJam, building tables and stands. The larger room the business is in used to be two smaller rooms, divided by a wall.
“I ripped everything down because there was a dividing wall,” he said.
Pointing to a corner, Petersen said, “We’ve been talking about building another sorting rack ... and then possibly another table to do more sorting.”
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