Hubby and I took in our crushed aluminum cans the recycling center this last weekend. We live about 20 minutes away from a place called West Virginia Cashin Recyclables in Nitro West Virginia that will buy any kind of recyclable metal materials you have. The rate at the time we took ours in was 69 cents per pound for pop cans. We ended up having 140 pounds of cans to turn in so our take was $96.60!! Not bad for something that we would have recycled anyways for free! Now I know that recycling laws and what facilities are available vary from state to state, but it is worth checking into to see if these facilities exist in your area. If this idea will make one non-recycling family decide to start recycling then it is worth every little bit of time it would take you to do it. We have a separate garbage can inside for our cans then transfer them outside when the bag is full. We then crush the cans in our can crusher ( $10 at home depot) that drops them into a big garbage bag to store them in till we have enough to fill the back of our S-10 Blazer with bags of cans to take to the recycling center.
The other types of items they take are anywhere from small appliances, deep freezers, sheet metal, engines, even old aluminum rims off of cars! The small appliances are normally purchased for a small flat fee due to them having to be taken apart for recycled pieces. Plus you need to find the current prices for your recycling center, the prices they quote can vary almost daily as its tied to how much those materials are worth on the market that day.
A final note to leave you with about the benefits of recycling- For each can recycled, you save enough energy to run a big screen TV for 4 hours, run a 100 watt bulb for twenty hours, or enough energy to equal a half a gallon of gas! And that is just for one can! Thats enough of a reason in my book any day, but the value of them adds another fact to it;
1. Between 1990 and 2000, Americans wasted a total of 7.1 million tons of cans: enough to manufacture 316,000 Boeing 737 airplanes—or enough to reproduce the world’s entire commercial air fleet 25 times.
2. Had the 50.7 billion cans wasted in 2001 been recycled, they would have saved the energy equivalent of 16 million barrels of crude oil: enough energy to generate electricity for 2.7 million U.S. homes for a year, or enough to supply over a million cars with gasoline for a year.
3. From 1986 to 2000, about 9.6 million tons of cans with a market value of over $10 billion were wasted
Source- http://www.container-recycling.org/publications/trashedcans/sample.htm
Have a great week everybody! And happy recycling!!!
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