Most nights, as the fans begin to stream into Yankee Stadium, Jean Rice walks the other way. Black work boots half laced, he heads to the parking lot, where he combs trash bags teeming with flies and searches under SUVs for beer cans. He is skilled at his task: On a good night he earns more than $60 on other people’s trash.

Mr. Rice, 65, started redeeming cans after a crack habit derailed his life in the 1980s. A cousin introduced him to collecting eight years after the state bottle bill, mandating a five-cent refundable deposit on all beer and soda containers sold in New York, became law in 1982. Fifteen years later, Mr. Rice, who has few teeth and thinning silver hair, is still at it, calling his trade “hard work and a hard dollar.”

It could soon get easier. Last night, the state Assembly passed the “better bottle bill,” originally proposed in 2002, which would allow new types of glass, metal, and plastic containers – such as those for water, juice, and tea – to be redeemed for five cents, and would transfer millions of dollars from bottlers to the state. While the bill still faces stiff opposition in the state Senate, backed by a powerful lobbying coalition of the beverage industry and supermarket owners, this was a significant first step.

Currently, bottlers, along with certain distributors and retailers, keep unclaimed deposits. The new law would transfer that windfall, which currently totals at least $85 million and may be as much as twice that, to the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.

In addition, the bottle bill would be updated to include some beverages that were less widely consumed in recyclable containers at the time the original law was passed. With about 30% of cans currently not redeemed each year, under the expanded product line, the Container Recycling Institute estimates that $179 million will go unclaimed in redemptions each year.

“This is not going to become a law overnight, but since the Assembly passed it, it is a major, major step forward, and a lot of people who haven’t been taking it seriously, will because of this,” a senior environmental associate at the New York Public Research Interest Group, Laura Haight, said yesterday. The group has been lobbying for the bill.

While Jean Rice welcomes the potential of wider collecting options, his primary concern is finding a site to redeem the containers. Under the current state law, stores that sell redeemable beverages are required to accept up to $12 worth, or 240 containers, per person per day. For their trouble, the distributors pay them a two-cent handling fee. But some stores, wary of the unwanted burden and of the prospect of homeless people blocking the entrance for customers, violate the current law on redeeming deposits by accepting none, accepting only a limited number, or accepting them only from regular customers.

“Most people collect bottles, they come around and are a pain in the neck,” the owner of a Food Expo supermarket in East Harlem, Paul Kim, said.

Those supermarkets that do welcome containers are sometimes inundated by collectors. At a Pathmark that Mr. Rice frequents, there have been hours-long lines recently. After the Puerto Rican Day Parade, he said he had to wait three days to deposit his glass recyclables. Last month, collectors had gathered at the East Harlem supermarket, which has two redemption spots and a special attendant on duty, from as far as Brooklyn, lured by a site that would let them deposit cans without keeping a strict limit.

In a nod to the burden on supermarkets, the new law would increase their handling fee by 1.5 cents, or 75%, and limit the number of containers that some stores are required to accept.

That decrease upsets Mr. Rice and the homeless advocacy group where he is an organizer, Picture the Homeless. Still, they express pleasure at another initiative to improve conditions for redeemers: The bill would also provide grants to small businesses to pay for their compliance, and incentives to encourage redemption centers to grow and expand, such as the nonprofit We Can.

While the Assembly debated the bill in Albany last night, Mr. Rice was back up at Yankee Stadium, collecting cans in his regular lot.

Parking lot 13B is key to his success as a can gleaner.

“Fifteen years ago I would do like the average person: Go to every receptacle and take the three to four recyclable items,” he said. It took him two years of picking up cans at Yankee Stadium before he discovered the site, where he said there are fewer problems from police and where fans, who gather in tailgate-style pregame parties, pile cans upon him.

Last Wednesday night, as he made his regular rounds past revelers drinking beer and barbecuing in the lot, some fans greeted him with a familiar smile. When offered cans, he opened his bag. For bottles he said he’d be back later with his cart.

Mr. Rice wouldn’t return. Bottles would require him to push a cart, and it is problematic to take one on the subway. Instead, he was helping an “African friend” who would arrive later on the ferry from South Street Seaport.

A challenger emerged later in the night. “She’s my adversary, but I don’t pay her no mind,” Mr. Rice said when a small, intense woman with a large shopping cart and two bags infringed on his lot. A few unfriendly words, and she rolled her cart away. “When you come to the same area 15 years, you have your own sort of community,” Mr. Rice said.

After the fans have left, Mr. Rice drinks a few beers, ties the bags into two sets, and hoists them over each shoulder, where, he said, “They balance almost like the scales of justice.”