I started stomping on the aluminum cans and tossing them in a big plastic garbage can. When it's full I take it up to my daughters house in Ft Collins and the grandson and I go to a large metal scrapyard to cash them in. That garbage can when full of flattened cans is around 16 pounds. You only get 50 cents a pound, so that's 8 dollars for the grandsons piggy bank. The effort is more about taking a visit to the scrapyard, because the grandson likes machinery of all kinds. One thing I noticed when looking online at the prices payed for aluminum cans by each state is different and California pays way above most all the other states.
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A couple of years ago my friend had the idea to trade in aluminum so we collected and crushed cans and went all over base finding scraps and sliced them down into can sized bits. Several cut fingers and weeks later we had 4 large outdoor trash bags full, so we loaded them up in her little sister’s wagon with corners poking out everywhere, and off to the recycling place we went, which was precisely 5.3 miles.
It was about 20 degrees and the wind chill half that, then an MP stopped us at the gate to give us a hard time, then it started sleeting on us about half way there. When we arrived two and a half hours later we were literally walking popsicles. My friend has red hair and her pigtails had frozen while being blown by the wind and she looked like Wendy. The guy working there seemed to get a huge kick out of that.
He didn’t even weigh the bags, he just pulled out $6 and handed it to us, $3 each. 😩
She got tired of my complaining as we got back to the gate and told me to shut up, so I called her Wendy, which started a fight. Not an argument, I mean a full blown fist throwing hair pulling fight. In the process she dropped her money and it blew away, and the MP that came out in the freezing rain to break us up wouldn’t let us chase it down. It might come as a surprise but MPs aren’t known for their patience or tolerance and he didn’t even give it any consideration.
So we ended up banking $1.50 each after we made up and I split my cut with her. 🙄
Sorry for the long story but I’ll still complain about it to anyone who will listen and just the thought of collecting cans again gives me anxiety.