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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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> 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.

It was not just a past time amongst people of lower economic means. My dad was a computer science professor and when I was a little kid we would go on long walks around our rural town collecting cans and bottles littered along the road and in wooded areas. He seemed kind of into the money we would get back from the supermarket, but I doubt he really cared about it that much. Maybe he was trying to teach me the value of the dollar/work. Maybe he was into the peaceful adventure of it. Or maybe he cared a tiny bit about the environment. It was probably a bit of all of that. Whatever it was, I remember that there were other people who did it too of all social classes that you would see at the supermarket recycling center. I'm not sure why people stopped. Maybe as others have pointed out, municipal recycling trucks have made people less enthusiastic about it.

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.

I've always been surprised that other states do not have bottle returns inside stores. What I used to routinely do in Michigan -- bring some cans with me to the grocery store -- I have never done in California, since you have to travel to a recycling center with limited hours.

I don't understand it either. It gets people to clean up litter and gives a lot of small handouts as rewards for keeping the state clean. There's probably overhead we don't see as consumers but it seems pretty beneficial to me.

Yeah, returns in stores is what's done in Norway as well and while varying over time return rates have regularly been around 95%.

It's structured as a tax on single-use containers that retailers can buy themselves free from based on the proportion they can demonstrate returns for, coupled with a shared recycling scheme they can join.

In practice it means you can return containers wherever you can buy them, and most larger grocery stores have machines to handle returns. (In fact, the largest manufacturer of "reverse vending machines" for bottles is Norwegian TOMRA).

Recycling rates in places without bottle returns in stores basically shows that just having recycling centres or even curb-side recycling from home is woefully insufficient if you're serious about dealing with plastic waste.

I lived in Ohio and I had friends drive their van full of bottles and cans up to Michigan all the time

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.

I keep my cans and bottles separate from paper etc and place them at the top of the wheelie bin when I put out the recycling.

At my college campus it was traditional to just throw empty cans into your yard while partying. By morning, they'd all be collected and gone.

Most garbage cans (at least those in dense areas) in my town of Calgary have a little shelf along the top that can hold cans/bottles. I can't see them being used for anything other than holding cans for collection. In Alberta, there is a deposit for all beverage containers (milk, juice, beer, wine, pop/cola etc) so there are a lot of people that collect for a living. Where I grew up (Ontario), there is only a deposit on beer and wine, not juice/milk/pop etc.

If you leave your trash out the night before, someone will come by, slit the bags open and remove anything made of metal. They will leave your trash in your yard.

The problem is more that the nickel deposit was never really adjusted with inflation.

A nickel in the '70s would be roughly a quarter today accounting for inflation, and there is certainly no state in the US with a deposit that high.

There is also less alumnium in a can now than from the 70's, so it may not be as bad as is apparent.

Doesn’t matter. The redemption cost is paid by the consumer when they buy the can—it is literally added to the bill, like a sales tax. Any recyclable value is extra.

The recycling centre's costs per ton of aluminium collected likely go up, though, from dealing with more physical cans.

None of the deposit goes to the recycling centers in the US either.

In the US recycling is a mostly private affair, which is why we saw things like bales of low-quality plastic getting shipped to China.

Can collecting has been wildly popular over here in Portland OR for as long as I can remember. Basically no cans that are set on the curb ever last long enough to get picked up by waste management. Typically it's homeless people who collect them but there's also enterprising immigrant families and seemingly people from other walks of life who do it, some who try to collect at more industrial scale by filling their cars with cans.

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.)

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