My parents collect cans for a living
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My parents collect cans for a living
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Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#2There was that time in the 1970s that my dad rode bikes all over town to collect can and made enough money to buy new aluminum bicycles.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#3No post body was provided.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#4I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be collected. It was kind of low-key charity of sorts.
At some point this just kind of dried up. I suspect it coincided with municipalities selling the rights to collect recyclables to waste management companies.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#5I'm guessing that the cans in this story are paid for by weight rather than the 10-20 cent deposit/refund you get where I am?
How much is that worth? With the deposit, collecting cans can be a fairly lucrative side line for children and the retired - you often see people collecting cans from bus stop trashbins and at music festivals or park events there will often be people going around with large trash offering to dispose of empty beer cans.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#6I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be colle…
It’s still a thing in the third world. But it’s very very low in income.
(Maybe that’s what the actual article is about, haven’t read it yet.)
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#7From the article
"Jessica is a proud first-generation Ecuadorian-American and a second-year Percy Ellis Sutton Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) student at Baruch College majoring in business management with a minor in law and policy."
Jessia is the American dream. First generation, got to college and writing like that.
Lots of Americans concentrate on what is wrong with America. There is value in that but it's really important to remember that America is still a place where immigrants can come and they or their children will really make it.
Good on them.
(BTW. I am not an American but I did live and work there.)
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#8I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be colle…
In the San Francisco Bay area, collecting cans is still very common among the homeless. In some parts of SF people will dig through your recycling (and garbage) every garbage day for recycling. Additionally, many public garbage cans have a semi-open section at the top which I have seen used for disposing of cans. I don't know if it's intentionally designed that way, but it's much easier for anyone to get the cans from this section vs the trash barrel itself.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#9I have not thought about collecting cans in a very long time. Decades ago you could make a decent bit of cash collecting aluminum cans. It was a common past time for poor people and undoubtedly contributed to the very high recycle rate for aluminum since it was a source of income for many people. This was widely known, so people would often go out of their way to make their aluminum trash easily available to be colle…
It's still sort of common in places with deposits on cans. In Michigan, I had a few friends growing up who did it to help their families. They got in trouble with the school on multiple occasions for digging them out of the trash, and what the school said implied it was that the school was profiting off the cans themselves. The episode of Seinfeld where they try to bring bottles to Michigan for the deposit always gives me a familiar feeling.
Actually, this article is about New York, so there should be a deposit there too, which explains why it's feasible.
Re: My parents collect cans for a living
#10I'm guessing that the cans in this story are paid for by weight rather than the 10-20 cent deposit/refund you get where I am? How much is that worth? With the deposit, collecting cans can be a fairly lucrative side line for children and the retired - you often see people collecting cans from bus stop trashbins and at music festivals or park events there will often be people going around with large trash offering to d…
With the caveat that I am pulling this from very old memory, the deposit on cans is still more like 5 cents. If you collected them in bulk then you were paid by weight, which was discounted on the presumption of non-aluminum mass (fluid, dirt, etc), and some people would try to sandbag their cans. It wasn't a lot of money by any means but it wasn't nothing either.
There was a lot more can litter back then, so it was easier to collect. A side effect of aluminum recycling is that most of that litter was cleaned up by can collectors.