The township has a mandatory recycling program, which we have the honor of paying for, through a fee added to our tax bills.
I don’t do mandatory.
I’ve been giving my aluminum cans to a friend’s son for years. He used them, along with others he’d collected, to finance camps, class trips, and his first car. But he’s done growed up now.
So I’ve been bagging them up and sticking the bags down cellar, while proclaiming I was absolutely, positively, going to haul them down to the scrap dealer, on at least two dozen different dates. Yesterday I loaded them into the pickup and secured them, determined to do the deed today. You can’t tackle such a momentous achievement in one day.
This morning it’s bright and sunny as I drive all the way across the county to the place I’m familiar with, from having worked close by... 30 years ago. Yeah yeah, don’t get ahead of me, they’re still there, but don’t do metal anymore. Putting my mental rolladex in high gear, I came up with a junk dealer, two old men barely scratching out a living, on the other side of the county. I’m off, driving slow enough I won’t start shedding canage, but trying to beat the approaching storm. I arrived just after the sky started leaking. One of the old men tells me he can take the cans, but can’t give me near as much as this other place, and gives me directions... to the other side of the county. I really didn’t care about getting a few bucks more, but he was so sincere, I had to do it.
Turning into a long straight driveway, lined with odd buildings and high fences, I immediately had to stop behind a long line of assorted vehicles... the scrappers. Dump trucks and stake bodies, loaded with appliances, boilers and large loads on metal. Pickups and vans loaded with mostly copper wire and aluminum lawn chairs/siding/pots&pans/whatever. Some were pulling trailers of every description. All were waiting to drive on the big scale to be weighed, before unloading, and being weighed again. The truck driver behind me seeing I had a load of cans, walked up and told me I could turn left at the next hole in the fence, and go directly to the small load shed. I thought that was very nice of him... or he wanted to get out of his path to the scales.
The joint was jumping, and everyone knew the routine but me. Finding the scale dude everyone seemed to be genuflecting to, I confessed noviceness. A couple pointed questions, then he sent the fork-truck guy out with a big steel tub to load the cans into, and put the tub on the scale. He gave me a pink slip with my first name and a couple cryptic numbers, then points me to a building that has a line of maybe 40 people clutching their pink slips. Now it’s turned from spitting to real rain. The line barely moves.
Waiting in line I had got lots of time to, uh... absorb the ambiance. Half the scrappers were groups of 2 or 3 guys, no women, probably 75% black, 20% Spanish-ish, 25% clean, 25% filthy, and a lot of them knew each other. When I finally got to the bullet proof window they were trying to converse through, I deposit my pink slip in the steel drawer for one of the guys inside to match up with a sheet of white paper, the computer spit out with the information direct from the scale. Pretty smart way to keep everybody honest, and to eliminate the possibility of arguments from the scrappers. The first inside guy hands it to the second inside guy, and he enters the poop into a PC, which prints a barcode on the white paper, that’s given to me.
Standing in line that long, I knew they weren’t handing out the money there, so I followed the leader to another small building, with what looked like an ATM machine. Fortunately there was somebody loitering that knew how to use it. Like the catalog/internet pick up at Sears, you have to position the bar code just so, and push “any button”, then the machine gives you the money in the least possible number of bills.
I’m wet, cold, 121 lbs of aluminum lighter, and $77 dollars richer, but it was a learning experience... and fun.
