Give Me Your Wretched Refuse

By Frank Trippett

When London Merchant Peter Durand patented the tin can in 1810, the world was changed forever. Canning revolutionized life on the farm, in the kitchen, on the battlefield. In the 20th century, life would seem primitive and deprived without cans. In 1986 some 102 billion canned items were manufactured. One category of container, the aluminum easy-open beverage can (69 billion produced last year), has so proliferated that the mere existence of empties has engendered a brand-new folk industry. Can picking, some call it.

Thousands of Americans are now caught up in harvesting empties for profit. Charities, civic clubs and groups like the Boy Scouts regularly go at it. Since March, Dade County, Fla., fire fighters have picked enough cans to raise $4,990 for a burn center at James M. Jackson Memorial Hospital. On Chicago's South Side, some 20 neighborhood can pickers process more than 12,000 tons of scrap paper and metal each year at the Resource Center, one of the nation's largest nonprofit recycling operations. Ken Dunn, founder of the center, sees the collectors as successful entrepreneurs. Says he: "These people have built a very viable industry."

The industry racks up impressive returns. Last year 33.3 billion aluminum beverage cans were recovered. One giant can producer, Reynolds Metals, paid nearly $93 million to recyclers, while taking in some 305 million lbs. of aluminum, enough to make nearly 8 billion cans.

Such a megabuck scale is foreign to the most colorful of the can pickers, the loners who scrounge through garbage cans around picnic grounds, sports arenas and office buildings. They turn in empties for a refund, usually a nickel a can, in the nine states that have bottle and can deposit laws. In other areas they can sell their refuse for 28 cents to 40 cents per lb.

Sometimes these pickers seem more casual than they turn out to be. Take Alberta Freeman, 55, who turns up at a recycling trailer in a New Orleans supermarket parking lot with 30-gal. garbage bags bulging with aluminum cans. Freeman, her daughter, a daughter-in-law and eleven grandchildren collaborate in can picking. Last year the family cleared some $500, which Grandma naturally spent on the grandchildren.

Or take Sam Hailey, by acclamation the champion can picker in Palm Beach County, Fla. In twelve years he has collected 944,000 cans and sold them for $10,000. Lately he has reined himself in; at 91 he no longer needs as much exercise as a doctor recommended in 1975 for treatment of a heart ailment.

Loners trolling for cans in New York City doubtless include some of the city's 50,000 or so homeless. But they are not always downtrodden. Can Picker John-Ed Croft, 50, abandoned a career as a computer program analyst to take up life as a painter. Croft has been accumulating cans, he says, to pay $11,486.72 he owes the Internal Revenue Service in back taxes. He insists that he plans to deliver his entire can stash to the district IRS office in lower Manhattan. IRS Spokesman Neil O'Keeffe says, "There's no provision for paying taxes with cans." So for all its utility, there is evidently one use to which the can cannot be put.

With reporting by Don Winbush/Atlanta, with other bureaus