Drinking pop was done in moderation in our household when I was a young child. It seems like around kindergarten we were still buying the beverage in bottles. The best part always came when a six pack or two had been emptied and I was invited to help my mom bring them to the store for a few cents. A few years later, aluminum cans supplanted glass as the favored soft drink containers. I first became interested in collecting cans during a Pepsi promotion where numbers printed on the inside of each cylinder could be totaled for prizes! Though we did not win anything, the relatively few cans our family drank were kept for months then redeemed for cash.
A few decades later, my son helped me collect and haul our cans to H & H Sanitation for a little spending money. He enjoyed seeing the machinery as a conveyor belt fed our load into the hopper of their baler. H & H decided to quit recycling a few months ago. Though Keep Alliance Beautiful had been accepting aluminum for some time, this decision shifted the dynamic. We have seen an increase in the volume of cans at the recycling center as people still want to recycle but often do not want to drive to Scottsbluff, the closest community with a facility that still pays for aluminum.
There is satisfaction solely from saving material from the landfill and knowing it will become a new material or product. Still, money in the hand is a motivator. At what point is recycling aluminum profitable given current conditions? As I write this column, on Wednesday, Sept. 30, the Scottsbluff Recycling Center (about 120 miles away) was paying 20 cents a pound for aluminum. Gasoline at the pump in Alliance was $2.13 a gallon. Let’s say the vehicle we are talking about gets 25 miles per gallon. In this example, it would take 10.65 pounds of aluminum to pay for a gallon of gas. At 4.8 gallons of gas to make the round trip to the Scottsbluff center that means 51.12 pounds of cans needed to pay for the gas. That is a lot of beer, pop or whatever to drink then fit into a family vehicle. And, don’t forget the value of more than two hours of your time, especially if that was the only destination. Drive a more fuel efficient car, a pickup that holds more cans, maybe a trailer, or wait for prices to increase and it will come out different. Congratulations to those who truly come out ahead.
We bale the bags of beverage cans and bottles that come to the recycling center in the same large bales as other materials, such as plastic and cardboard. Uncrushed cans work the best to bale. As with any other sorted recyclable material, please leave out glass, plastic and especially trash. Aluminum is a money maker for KAB with bales weighing hundreds of pounds. The increased flow of cans helps our budget, which is funded primarily through grants.
However, I am not telling anyone where to recycle. KAB just wants the residents we serve to know there are white containers for aluminum cans next to the green cardboard trailer on the east end of the lot we use at Second Street and Cheyenne Avenue. Also, people are able to drop off cans at the recycling center during business hours, 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. Monday-Friday. Aluminum cans are also welcomed through our curbside program.