The Dignity Bag reframes Montreal's binners as essential workers

A Montreal-based non-profit and a Toronto ad agency have launched a project aimed at making life easier for the city's binners to change how people see them.

The Dignity Bag is exactly what it sounds like: a purpose-built carrier for collecting refundable containers, designed in collaboration with binners. Created by No Fixed Address in partnership with Les Valoristes Coopérative de Solidarité, the bag holds up to 240 aluminum cans, features quick-release drawstrings, adjustable straps, and high-visibility reflective elements for safety.

Beyond functional design, the project positions binners—the people who collect cans and bottles from public bins across the city—as an essential part of Montreal's recycling infrastructure rather than people simply scraping by. In Montreal alone, binners recover millions of aluminum cans annually, ensuring materials actually make it back into the circular economy.

"Their work is not recognized. Not valued. And not seen," reads the campaign site, which frames the bag as both a practical tool and a statement about visibility and respect.

Les Valoristes, originally founded as Projet Consigne in 2005, has spent nearly two decades working with binners across Montreal, advocating for them on social, environmental, and economic levels. The organization provided input throughout the design process to ensure the bag would meet real needs.

The initiative is all-weather, lightweight, tear-resistant, and built for the realities of street collection work—early mornings, late nights, and heavy loads. No Fixed Address, which describes itself as an agency for "challenger brands taking the leap," is aiming to supply every working binner in Canada with their own bag.

The campaign treats design as advocacy: a green bag with bold white lettering that reads "MONTREAL URBAN RECYCLING CREW" turns anonymous work into visible labour; a reframing exercise as much as a distribution effort that acknowledges how people doing this work are already part of the system, whether the system acknowledges them or not.