My beer can crusher project

[EL34]

This should bring a smile or two this holiday season
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsw5cYEzpBs

[PRR]

My store's can machine credits me 5 cents for every can it can read the bar-code on (it only takes uncrushed cans).



We pick-up cans from the ditch and even along the road as we drive.

You need a bottle-deposit law.

[silverfox]

I would think with all those unreadable Magazines sitting around the inspiration for a feeder would have come natural. About 60 MM I would think. You should try to market this on the Duck Hunting Channel- Of course you'll hafa speed er up for a real "Duck Hunt".

silverfox.

[shooter]

Notice MI, we get 10 cents a can!, the homeless can is a rare find

as a 12yr old paperboy with 2 much time on my hands, my route ended a mile from home, so I took every can, bottle, tire, etc and just placed them end to end for that mile, it made the papers! and now we get a dime a can!

[TIMBO]

Yeah, But what is your rate of consumption, that's a BIIIIIIIIIIG bag.

[EL34]

I have been saving cans for a few years because I knew I would be making this some day.


We don't have can and bottle laws here in NC


You take them to a scrap metal place and get about .40 a pound for the aluminum
It's about a 5 to one crush ratio
So 5 contractor sized bags get reduced down to one bag, which is nice

A full 32 gallon contractor bag of crushed cans is quite heavy
I'll have to weigh one and see what that weight is

[EL34]

You guys that have can and bottle deposit laws probably pay up front for the cans when you buy the beer?

So you only get your money back when you return the cans and bottles you bought and paid for

Good laws for sure, but you are not making money on the cans and bottles unless you take in cans and bottles that you did not purchase 

Not sure what the beer prices are compared to here in NC
Walmart is a good place to compare prices state to state.

Our local Walmart sells everything from American pilsner by the case to some of the more expensive beers from Sierra nevada and other higher end brewers

[PRR]

> you only get your money back when you return the cans and bottles you bought and paid for

Correct. We pay price+deposit, get deposit back. It is break-even to us (minus the float of a dime for a month).

> Good laws for sure, but you are not making money on the cans and bottles unless you take in cans and bottles that you did not purchase

Which has interesting side-effects.

General Assistance (welfare) lets you buy food for the children, but not cigarettes or beer. You can buy bottled water, very legitimately (much Maine well water is dubious or bad). You can buy a 96-pack of small bottles of water, welfare covers the deposit, dump the water and go back to get the deposit refund. If you dump the water in the parking lot, someone will notice and call the cops. It's not clearly illegal, but you could lose your welfare.

NH has no bottle law. There are Maine towns along the NH border where can refunding exceeds the cans sold. Clearly someone smuggles NH cans (no deposit collected) into Maine (deposit "refunded"). This is illegal, but the State has no skin in the game so hardly cares. The drink distributors don't like getting ripped-off, but there's dozens of small roads over the border so is impractical to watch for pickups full of bags of cans. _OTOH_: NH has low-low tax on booze, and their big liquor shop is a mile outside of Maine. Lots of Mainers get their booze in NH and smuggle it back. This directly hurts Maine government (lost tax). Maine complains, NH laughs. In *that* case, the main road into the big NH booze shop is the TurnPike, and Maine occasionally watches the northbound tollbooths for cars overflowing with cartons of Seagrams. This is for show; they can't possibly catch 1% of the booty.

As Shooter says, homeless cans don't stay homeless, especially at 5 or 10 cents each. Poor folk (we say "thrifty") keep a bucket for deposit bottles, and run them back when it fills. Rich folks can donate to scouts or schools who collect the refunds. Reckless folks throw cans out the truck window, and I make a nickle a week just walking the ditch. We find enough roadside cans on our travels that we have a pail in the minivan; sometimes you find the remains of a parking-lot party and score a buck in one swoop. Quite a few folks collect cans/bottles as a steady income ("take in cans and bottles that you did not purchase"), walking the roads and parking lots.

I said it is break-even. Actually the recycling agents get a cut somewhere. It must be a slim cut, many quit the business. A lot of time and a lot of storage (apparently they don't crush). There are independent recyclers, some long-time and others come and go. Some stores take-back, but here it is not required. Wal-Mart did for a year and one day the machines vanished. Shaw's supermarket has nice machines (they scan the can and issue a credit slip); Carrol's minimart has a guy in the back, but most stores don't.

Main difference is: with bottle law the refund tracks back to the beverage distributor, so the bar-code must be readable. With no deposit, you get the bulk scrap price, and nobody cares who sold it, only that you are not mixing steel and dirt in with aluminum; you crush.

40 cents is a good price. I remember 20.

[PRR]

Corrections:

Maine beverage stores must refund deposits *unless* they have an agreement with another redemption agency. Our town has two redemption agents who have been around forever; these probably handle returns for most of the stores around here.

There really are not many "distributors" north of Portland. Up here I think Pepsi and Coke come on the same truck; not worth sending two half-trucks a week. However the law does mention "commingling", where several distributors agree that any one of them will handle the traffic for all in the group.

The redemption agent gets 4 cents a can (some exceptions). Since I pay 5 cents and get-back 5 cents, this means the distributor is forced to pay for nearly all the redemption costs. No problem, prices up here *are* higher than in free states, and I guess it is not just about hauling stuff up the coast.

Wikipedia says the US's overall recycling rate for beverage containers is 33%, but 70% where there is a bottle bill, and Maine claims 90% but without any supporting evidence. I don't see the overall picture, but I know that some of the missing 10% in Maine turns up far back from my ditch, full of muck and slugs with decades-old date-codes, and I return those.

TripAdviser claims that "reverse vending machines" will refuse to accept and refund cans from another state. Having lived the life several years, I am sure there is NO way to tell, at least on the nationally distributed brands. (If Winemucca Nevada has a local beer not sold past the Utah border, its bar-code won't be known to a Maine machine which will spit it back.)

Technically the fine for bringing NH containers in for Maine deposit refund is $100 PER BOTTLE! But again there is no way to tell unless you are so notorious that a cop followed you from NH to the Maine redemption and took pictures (and you didn't notice). There is a requirement that more than 2,500(!) bottles you must show ID; if they did build a strong case for deposit-smuggle fraud they would know who the big players were. But as the State has no part in the deposit money, it isn't a priority for the police. Distributors could try to make cases; I suspect they just raise their retail prices to cover the estimated loss.

[TIMBO]

WOW, That's way too complicated.
I do remember as a kid taking a short walk to the corner shop and being able to find a couple of discarded coke bottles along the way, these were use to fund a sizable bag of lollies.
I don't remember when they removed the 5c per bottle (probably when parents were sick of spending a fortune on dentist bills) this inturn lead to increased waste in landfill, government was forced to do something and recyclers would pay $$ for glass and alli, this lead to people steeling mainly aluminium/copper.I work as a building contractor to the local electricity company and the substations were targeted and aluminium trench covers and Hi voltage cable was being stolen.One substation had to replace $45,000.00 of aluminium trench covers.
Electricity company(government own) PIST forced police to act and recyclers targeted and policed closed down business's. Thieves now fill shipping containers and send overseas.
Recycle bins are now part of the door to door rubbish pickup as part of the government's GREEN policy.
So its easier to chuck the cans/bottles/paper/cardboard etc. in the recycle bin,cause you ain't gonna get much for it anyway.   

[EL34]

The cans are labelled for the deposit rates per state aren't they?

The beer cans I have here have nothing on them about the deposit amounts

I don't think I can transport these cans to Michigan and get .10 each for them

So .40 a pound crushed is what I do 

[shooter]

I don't think I can transport these cans to Michigan and get .10 each for them

In the "early days" it was worth it to run truckloads up from IN
those days are gone,

You do pay up-front, so you are right, we "break-even", but you do have to factor PRR'S comments, my wife and I would make about $2 per week on our 2mile walk, lots of beer drinking pickups in the farm country.
I sell beer now, 6pk of Lite, $5.99 out the cooler, $.6 bottle, tax, $6.95 out the door.

[EL34]

I sell beer now, 6pk of Lite, $5.99 out the cooler, $.6 bottle, tax, $6.95 out the door.

$6.95 for a 6 pack of Miller Lite?


It's $14 for a 24 can case here in NC at Walmart :)
Bottles are about the same price

[shooter]

Yup!, my "canned" line; "this is a convenience store, not a cheap store"
We, do sell 24pk bottles for 13.95 +tax & bottle, but they are warm, and 90% of the beer drinkers expect at least mild frost-bite by the time they check-out
Not get to deep in the weeds, most folks here have a *distain* for Wal-Mart  and their customers.

[PRR]

> One substation had to replace $45,000.00 of aluminium trench covers.
> Thieves now fill shipping containers and send overseas.

Around here, $4,000 is about the top metal-theft. Most cases are under $100.

Pole ground wires are popular, because you don't have to climb a fence. I hate that, because our long sparse pole runs are very prone to lightning strike, and frequent grounding is the first-line defense.

Pole-wire suppliers now sell a product with ID on it, either serial number or your company name. If BPL can document they bought and installed (and did not salvage) wire with serial numbers 1200 to 2400, and wire with number 1234 is found at scrap-yard, they have legal proof that it is their wire. Of course that does not help the millions of miles already installed.

I'd think the scrap-yard would be wary of buying obvious Power Company scrap unless the seller can show Company ID and a Surplus document. (I assume that sub-contractors must turn-over all valuable salvage to the company-- its their property and is carried on their books as a capital investment.) Grey-area where customer-owned wire is salvaged by a private electrician. But that would never be $45k! (Maybe a factory; but the seller would be a known mega-contractor.)

Same for copper pipes. I ripped about all the copper out of a house and sold it, a popular felony here in vacationland. The only quibble was that I did not know to cut the valves out (iron parts) to get full copper price. It happened to be MY house, and I even brought receipts for PEX to show it was replacement not theft, but they didn't ask. (I guess if I were a habitual thief I would know to cut the valves out.)

Did not know it was worth shipping containers out of the country to avoid ownership questions.

Steel is not worth hauling 30 miles now. When the Chinese were building their Olympics it was a steady stream of overloaded scrap trucks to the yards.

[shooter]

BTW, I WAS impressed by the ingenuity
Last yr the gvmt here changed the law, now you are thumb-printed to sell scrap! Put lots of mom n pops outta business
If you have copper and want CASH, they can only take $25 per day, so I bring my loppers, get the scales to 24.95!  The biggest theft last year was 3miles of copper!  they all got busted.
 

[kagliostro]

Cool machine Doug

Here in Italy we must confer to the dumps the empty can and also we must pay for that 

Franco

[jojokeo]

The cans are labelled for the deposit rates per state aren't they?

The beer cans I have here have nothing on them about the deposit amounts

I don't think I can transport these cans to Michigan and get .10 each for them

So .40 a pound crushed is what I do 

This reminds me of an episode from Seinfeld and of Kramer & Newman's failed attempt to recycle out of state using Newman's mail truck 
Nice machine there Doug. I gave up saving beer cans a long time ago. It became an attraction & breeding ground for cockroaches where I used to live. I also noticed that your cans have become dry? But in "normal" working conditions the spillage, smell, mess, along with the roaches...I pass on the whole thing and throw my stuff in the blue recycle bin that gets emptied weekly by our local disposal dept. So for me it's not worth the extra money and hassles.    There may have to be a smiley that crushes the can after the chug now???

[EL34]

No roaches here in the mountains of NC 


That was a big plus to me after living in FL for 28 years

I've crushed about 40 pounds of cans so far

[jojokeo]

Watch out for those hands and fingers! Especially as you get that feeder going...I'd hate to hear about a tragic accidental crushing of something not aluminum.