My first recollection of recycling takes me back to when I was about twelve years old, searching the neighborhood and our family basement for empty soda bottles, with my brother . We would walk those bottles to our neighborhood A&P grocery store and cash them in for two cents each.
I had four younger brothers who drank milk by the gallon. My father used to buy milk every evening from the High’s Milk Store, on his way home from work. High’s milk was sold in returnable gallon glass jugs. When we returned the jugs to the store we were paid 25 cents for each one.
Back in the day, all the change we earned from selling our bottles was much appreciated.
Today over 50 years later, I have a son who has caught the recycling bug. As a side hustle he earns extra money by finding and selling scrap metal to the scrap yard to be recycled. He does not do it every day, but on a good day he is rewarded well for his efforts.
He told me that he finds it almost impossible to drive by a piece of discarded metal without checking it out. He said seeing discarded metal is like seeing dollar bills laying all over the ground.
One day I went scrapping with him. It was a beautiful summer day. He said he knew of a place in our community where a house had been torn down. He felt there may be some metal laying around.
Upon arriving I could see where a house once stood. Weeds and small bushes had started to reclaim the site. I stood near our station wagon while he walked around pushing aside bushes, kicking the ground, looking for metal.
In literally 5 or 10 minutes he was calling out to me that he had found something. I watched as he drug out a half buried, very long dirty pipe, about 4 inches in diameter. We found 6 pipes in all.
We could not tell immediately what type metal they were made of. They were matted and caked with dirt. My son pulled a file from his pocket. Knocking some of the dirt off a small section of one, he filed away some of the greenish tarnish, then he put his magnet to it.
The pipe did not attract the magnet. This fact and the color of the filed metal told us that the pipes were copper,
We got the pipes to the scrap yard. On this day we had 121 pounds of #2 copper, paying $2.55 per pound. We were paid $308. Not bad for about an hour’s work.
Leave a comment. Do you like to recycle? Do you scrap?
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