Recycling Day

I will begin this post by clarifying the cans mentioned in this story are NOT from my collection. 

As far back as 2015 I mentioned in a post that my kids decided to recycle cans they gathered for some extra money.  Word spread, friends and family started donating a can here, a can there, a bag here, a bag there...

And this was my garage a few days ago.  My parents had also started to keep cans to recycle and had a smaller pile of bags in the corner of their garage.  And with the possible purchase of another car soon, I needed my garage back.  So my dad loaded their bags on his trailer and came to my house where the kids loaded our bags on the trailer.  Then we took a family trip to the recycler.

We counted roughly 100 bags in total.  Almost all were aluminum cans, but there were about a dozen bags of tin cans people from church had brought to us.  The recycler said they took tin as well.

The main machine they used was this red beast.  The bags were emptied into the hopper on the right side (#1 in the pic).  A belt carried the cans up to the top and dropped them into rolling baskets (#2).  We filled more than a dozen of those baskets.  The rolling baskets were then gathered on a scale built into the floor (#3).  The white bags are the tin cans being weighed on the scale.  After the cans were weighed, the rolling baskets were rolled to a machine on the far right side of the pic (#4) and the can were dumped in and crushed.

It took quite a while.  It was a very hot and humid day.  The recycling place was filthy and the dirt road and parking lot were muddy from recent rain.  There were sweat bees and wasps buzzing us the whole time.  But the kids didn't mind any of that because at the end of the trip they had a check to split.

I forget the exact numbers, but we had over 200 pounds of aluminum @ $.45/pound and around 100 pounds of tin @ $.08/pound.  It was a pretty good day.  Each kid got over $55 and I got my garage back!

Epilogue: We are no longer in the can recycling business.