How Much Are Aluminum Cans Worth?
I did some analysis to figure out just how much a person might make by selling aluminum cans to a scrap yard as opposed to just recycling them through their usual garbage and recycling pickup service.
How Much Aluminum Will You Collect?
The answer to this question is going to vary family to family. For the purpose of this example, let’s use a family of 4 that consumes one beverage each per day from an aluminum can for a total of 28 cans per week or 1456 cans in one year.
How Much is Aluminum Worth?
The amount scrap yards buy cans will vary on the market cost of aluminum. Normally, scrap yards will pay roughly half of the market cost of aluminum per pound. A nearby scrap yard lists their aluminum can buyback rate as varying between $0.07 and $0.30 per pound. For the purpose of this example, let’s use the high end of the range; $0.30 per pound.
How Many Cans Equal A Pound?
Aluminum cans are lighter today than they were in the past. At today’s weight, it takes 31 cans to equal one pound.
Analysis
1456 cans from a family of 4 consuming one beverage from an aluminum can per year, at 31 cans per pound yields (rounding up) 47 pounds of aluminum. If we got $0.30 per pound at the scrapyard, our year’s worth of cans would give us a payday of $14.10.
Not Just Cans
Scrap yards buy aluminum. While cans are a very common form of the disposable metal, they aren’t the only one. If you find other things, such as used aluminum foil or disposable pans, toss them in with your cans to increase the weight of the scrap metal, and thus the amount of money you’ll get.
Don’t Cheat the System
Some people will try to increase the weight of their aluminum by burying other objects. The scrap yard usually runs the aluminum through a conveyer with a magnet on the end. Aluminum won’t stick to the magnet, but other objects will. If you try to cheat the system, you will get caught.
The time and effort needed to separate a family’s cans, store them, and take them into a scrap yard seems hardly worth $14.10. This might be a good exercise for a young child for a lesson in responsibility and work ethic, but hardly worth the time for an adult. There are certainly better ways to earn a little extra cash.
How about you, Clever Friends, have you brought aluminum cans to a scrap yard for money?
Read More
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- Can K-Cups Be Used More Than Once?
- 3 Reasons You Should Start Using Recycled Auto Parts
- Save Money By Taking Out Your Own Trash
Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children, Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.
In my zip code, the scavengers come out en force, but things have changed. Generally speaking, the scavengers are either latinos who I suspect take the cans to California where they bilk the state at 5 cents per can (far above the per pound price you proffer) or older retired people who do this I think to augment their retirement accounts and pick up cans while they walk their dog or run errands. It used to be much easier. Since I live near a municipal boundary, at one point we had three different garbage days, two of which had separated recyclables in stacking milk crates, so it was probably possible to get 200-300 each of those mornings in an hour or so since many people separated the cans for you. While still a much lower return than the hourly wage, for a retired, poor, or young person, that’s free money. Now, we all have the same amalgamated service with large and deep cans so that you literally must fish for cans located in the bottom of the barrel. This has not deterred many latinos who open every single can and use grabbers, gloves, and flashlights in winter while they rifle through my refuse. I agree with you. I can earn that much money in a shorter amount of time doing something else or I can change my behaviors to save money so that I don’t have to worry about recycling cans. When I was 12, they were worth 25 cents/pound, so adjusted for inflation this is a bad return even in my lifetime.
As a child, I picked up cans to earn money to pay for sporting equipment. I bought most of my baseball gear and balls for other sports based on those cans discarded without a thought. Back then, I saw aluminum cans as money on the ground. Now I just see refuse.
Last summer, the recycling companies in Vegas stopped accepting aluminum cans for recycling. Aluminum has a small profit margin, and due to COVID, there was no demand for it. Ironically now the bottling manufacturers (beer and soda) are running out of canned items because there is not enough aluminum.
Add to that the number of latin persons who traverse the neighborhoods and unabashedly dig through your garbage, and you’ll have to do a crapton of work to get enough aluminum to make it worthwhile. This is especially true now that we have a single large can for mixed recycling, so they are mixed in with other items and typically at the bottom of the can. You are far better off just getting a second part time job given the amount of time you’ll have to dedicate to earn any money.
When I was a child, I remember earning $0.25/lb. The best price I have ever seen in Vegas was $0.41/lb. In December of 2019, the price was $0.21/lb. You’ll have to either store them on your property until you have $20 worth to take it and make it worth the time of driving to, standing at and collecting money from the recycler or travel to CA and defraud the government out of the pfand that they charge. Skip buying a coffee once a month and you’ll do better.