A harvest of aluminum

Image from Flickr.

You never know how much trash is on your street until you try to pick it up. I started collecting crushed cans a couple of weeks ago. It's incredible how many I've gathered since then. I walk the same route to work every day, and I keep finding more!

At landfills, most of the trash is smashed and buried into the landscape, but some of it escapes and becomes a problem known as "blowing trash." Our neighborhood is also affected by this phenomenon. If I go through our yard in the morning and clean up all the half-empty bottles, Star Crunch wrappers, and Styrofoam packaging I can find, a new assortment of garbage will have found its way to our lot by the end of the day.

As a homeowner, it sucks. As a junk collector, it was very handy, for a while. Unfortunately, there are already more flattened cans in my basement than I can possibly paint in the immediate future. I had to give up bringing them home. I guess I could still recycle them, but the novelty of picking up dirty trash has started to wear off.