Anyone here scrap various food containers/scrap?

Think stuff that you find just rumbling around the house...tin foil, tin cans, etc...

Any of you scrap any of this?



Ever get a significant amount of cash doing it?

I scrap my steel food cans and alum cat food cans if they are clean and rinsed out cause if not they attract bugs and critters. But thats how i got my cat, someone dumped her at 3 months old. She was trying to lick dryed food remanence from empty cat food cans my sister gave me i left out in the driveway. It was living/hiding in my garage for a week in December and i couldnt leave that poor cat out there in the cold.

Jeez .... i dunno .... there's got to be a better way of doing the metals recycling. Up until fairly recently ... we sent most of our trash off to the incinerator. The trash was burned to make electricity and the metals were sorted from the ash afterward. The incinerator plant must have been processing at least 200 tons of MSW a day.

The economy of scale and the industrial process is really the best way to go when dealing with low value recyclable items. You would never get anywhere doing one piece at a time by hand.

Ummmm .... i dunno. I think it's all about the choices you make. You always have to ask yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze. You have to run your scrapping operation like a business even if you're only doing a few metal cans here & there. Small time or big time it's all the same. Sometimes you think you are making gain when you're actually falling behind. You always have to consider the real cost of doing business. Some jobs aren't worth doing because it costs you more to do them than you make at the yard.

You have to consider the value of your time as well. The time you put into it is something you have to keep track of if you're running it like a business. You might only be making one dollar an hour even if you are managing to turn a profit. You might make fifteen or twenty dollars an hour doing some other kind of work.

I see this every day at work. We have a community metals recycling pile at the transfer station where people drop off their scrap metal. It's also okay to pick up a few pieces here and there if you are into scrapping. I like to watch the scrappers as they're picking the pile. You can tell a lot about people by observing how they do their scrapping work. I'm seeing a lot more pickers these days now that non-ferrous prices are up. There might be 20 or 30 people coming through a day. The main problem is that there are so many people trying to do it .... nobody is making anything. Just a little piece here and a little piece there. Nobody is making enough to even meet expenses.

They don't realize it ... but it's a slipping down life.

It's kinda sad to watch cause you get to know the scrappers personally after you have been there for awhile. There's an old timer in his 80's that i'm kind of fond of. He made some bad choices in life but he always had the work ethic. He tries to make a little extra with scrapping but it really isn't working for him. He got behind on his home heating oil bill and now they won't deliver to him anymore. He's fallen a few years behind on his property tax and it won't be too much longer before the town takes his home and puts it up for auction.

It's tragic to see when bad choices and bad business decisions inevitably catch up with someone. There's not much you can do because their fate is inevitably their own.

The only thing we charge for at our transfer station is just the Freon units. Things like fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and dehumidifiers are $ 12.00. Everything else is free to drop off. It's all paid for out of local property and excise taxes. It's simpler and less hassle for the people coming through that way.

I think my favorite part of the job is the metals pile. It's recycling that really works. We even get paid for it. The main yard about 60 miles away sends out a truck & trailer rig and they haul off 10 - 14 tons of mixed metal at a time. In fact .... i've got a couple of loads ready to go. I'm hoping that they show up this week cause the pile is about 14' high right now.

The single sort recycling of cardboard, plastics, and cans .... i'm not so crazy about. It costs about 4x more per ton to get rid of the trash that way. It would make more money sense to just throw that stuff into the trash compactor with the rest of the MSW. I think it would make more sense from an environmental point of view as well. I have to manage some of the trucking & logistics. I'll tell ya .... the carbon footprint of transportation of that low value recyclable stuff is huge. I don't think that anyone who has environmental concerns would ever support it if they knew what was going on behind the scenes.

In theory ... we also make money off the deposit bottles & cans. Most people here don't want to bother with cashing in their beverage containers at the store. We've got a separate building where people can sort them into plastic,glass,or aluminum barrels. The town gets the deposit value when the redemption company comes down to pick them up. The problem is that none of the redemption companies are willing to come down and pick them up anymore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze for them. It's been over a year and a half and the building is full to overflowing now. I would say that part of the recycling effort has been a complete failure.

Anyhow ... different places have different ways of doing things. Some places here in Maine charge for everything they take it. They probably make a lot of money off the trash.

Originally Posted by hobo finds

That's insane about the bottle deposits. Alum cans are $.60 and #1 plastic beverage is $.15.... people still trying to take them to California to try and make a quick buck. But it always ends bad for them. Lmafo

I'm kind of disappointed with the bottle bill here. It probably made sense when they started it back in the 1970's. It was $ .05 for a bottle or can ... $ .15 for a liquor or wine bottle. The redemption center made $ .03 as a "handling fee" on every bottle & can. That was a lot of money back then because the dollar was worth more.

That three cents handling fee isn't much in this day and age. A lot of our redemption centers went bankrupt and closed because they couldn't make a profit. They increased it to six cents a bottle last year but that still isn't worth doing.

I think that's why the redemption center won't come and pick up our bottles anymore. We've got a whole building full packed to the rafters but it would cost a small fortune for them to come pick them up and sort them back at their shop. Figure a pickup truck towing a trailer and two men is easily $ 100.00/hr. in operating expense. Then there's all the time to sort the mess when they get em' all back to the redemption center. They're probably all moldy and nasty smelling from where they've been sitting in plastic bags for the past year and a half. Some jobs just aren't worth doing.

Really ... the most sensible thing for us to do would be to just load the whole mess into the trash compactor and be done with it. It's not working for us anymore.

Originally Posted by hobo finds

We pay $22.25 a month for weekly garbage and bi weekly recycling pick up. Also a $0.45 recycling surcharge. Also get 2 days a year for bulk and brush items that gets picked up at your property.

There are different options here. A lot of people just bring their trash to the transfer station and toss it into the compactor. Sunday is our busiest day. That's when all the local working folks do their chores.

Some people prefer to have their trash picked up at their home or place of business. We have a number of different private contractors that provide that service. That's a service that the customer pays for.

Some cities and towns here in Maine pay big companies like Waste Management to do curbside curbside pickup once or twice a week. It's paid for out of taxes.

It's kind of a mixed bag in the way we do things here in Maine. Personally ... i like the way we do things in my town. It makes it so that working people who may not have very much money in their pocket can get rid of their trash without it being a problem. The rich summer people with ten million dollar estates overlooking the ocean pick up the lion's share of the tax local burden here.