In this video I want to talk a little about can crushers. Now there are quite a few brands out there for sale but they all appear to be the same design. The one I'm using and you see in this video is a Mckay. I got it off Amazon and it was about $20 bucks. Here's a link to the one I bought. Full disclosure, I make a little commission if you purchase though this link:
https://amzn.to/3ws3qUZ
These are great for compacting aluminum cans if your looking to make a little money from the scrap, or you want to make room in your recycling bin, or maybe you just want to entertain the kids. What ever the reason. What I want to show you today is not only how these works, but how I went about mounting it so that I can use it anywhere in or outside the house. Here you see I'm using it outside in front of my trash cans. Where I can just toss the crushed cans onto my recycle bin. Very convenient!

The crushers are designed to mount to a flat surface using the screws that come with it. Typically you attach the machine to any solid surface such as a wall or table. I originally thought I'd mount mine out in the garage on the wall, but it gets cold out there in the winter, so I started thinking about how I could make the installation portable, That's when I though it could attach it to a board long enough that the crusher would be at good height and I wouldn't have to bend over. I could store it in the corner of the garage and just pull it out whenever I needed to crush cans. I started with a piece of 6” wide treated deck board I had laying around. I cut it to 60” inches in length. I then used my drill to mount the crusher towards the top of the board. I took some cord and tape and rigged a 2” thick piece of foam to the top back, this lets me lean it up against any surface and not mare it up.



Now as far as crushing cans. It's a pretty easy task. For starters I take my can and squeeze a dimple on four sides. This helps so you don't need to apply as much force to crush the can. Then it's simply a matter of pulling the padded handle down until you have a can a third the original size.

If your wanting to make money recycling your cans you should first flush out the cans with hot water to remove any of the suggary residue. This is required in states with bottle bill legislation where consumers pay a deposit on aluminum cans. In these states you can get 510 cents for a clean can. In these states it's certainly worth while to recycle your cans.

In the majority of states such as North Carolina where I live, it's questionable as to whether it's worth the time and effort to cash in your scrap aluminum. For example here in North Carolina the going rate for aluminum cans is 24 cents a pound for dirty cans and 48 cents for cleaned cans. It takes somewhere between 3235 cans to make a pound. A typical garbage bag full of crushed cans might hold around 200 cans, so that's worth about a dollar and fifty cents. If you figure the cost of gas it's barely worth it to take a bag full to the recycle center and if you start saving up your cans to reduce your delivery costs, your going to need a lot of space to store them. A hundred dollars worth of cans would be somewhere around 70 bags full. So your probably not going to make a killing crushing cans for recycle.

Okay, so that's all I got on can crushing. I hope you found this short video helpful and as always thanks for watching.