Today we made the annual trip to the scrap metal place that receives metal for recycling. We work at reusing items by using those items to build or repair something on the place. Sometimes, there is no reusing an item, it is placed in our “scrap metal bin”.
The “scrap metal bin” is a repurposed truck bed. My husband’s son replaced his regular truck bed with a flat bed. He gave us the truck bed as the company was going to charge him for disposal of the old bed. We have been putting any unusable metal for collection in this old truck bed. When the truck bed gets full, we load the metal onto the trailer and take it to a recycling place.
At the recycling place, we are paid for the pounds or tons we bring in. If we were to take these items to the dump station for trash we would have to pay to “dump” the metal there and we would have to sort the metal into another bin separate from trash. The dump station takes the bin to a recycling place and receive the money for my unusable metal. Instead, we save it up and get paid for it.
We do not make much money from saving and hauling the metal to a recycling place. There are people who will come to your place, pick up the old rusty farm equipment, wire and other metal and haul it away. Sometimes they charge to do the clean up, sometimes they do it only for the scrap metal. There is a person in the community where we live who will haul away old appliances and metal items for no fee. Old appliances, farm equipment, cans from canned vegetables and fruits, bent pipe, bent metal posts, anything metal can be taken in for recycling.
It requires less energy to metal scrap metal down and recast than to get the iron from ore.
I also save all the aluminum cans. The aluminum goes into a different bin. It takes over a year to get that bin filled.
It does not seem like much, but we do try to take care of the earth. We recycle, compost and repurpose items.
Me, Myself and I 