Crushing Aluminum Cans, A Process Improvement

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Collecting Aluminum Cans, Purpose:

For a field trip, the school my son attends incorporated a program that included crushing aluminum cans in an effort to teach kids about recycling, and a quick lesson in entrepreneurship.

My son was above to save up enough cans (over 6 or more  months) to pay for his entire trip this way.  The cost per student for the trip was $40.  Of course he had to collect cans from family, friends and neighbors.

Crushing Aluminum Cans, Process Improvement

In my last post about my son’s aluminum can entrepreneur adventure, I think I may have mentioned that I discovered a process improvement that makes the task easier.

The process improvement is extremely simple, but make a huge difference in the effort to crush the cans.  The secret is to squeeze the cans just slightly so that the integrity of the can isn’t 100%.  This creates a flaw in the can and it’s crushes much easier in the can crusher apparatus.

Crushing Aluminum Cans, Performance Improvement

Prior to the process improvement, my son was able to crush cans at a rate of 5 per minute.  After teaching him the new technique, he was able to average about 13 cans per minute!  That’s a 160 percent improvement!   we were able to process the entire bag in 15 minutes versus 45 minutes it would normally take me.

Compression of Aluminum Cans

I was able to crush two large bags full of cans.  The sad thing is that they fill up less than 1/4 of the large lawn bags.  This is good from me, but my son really hoped there would be more cans in the bag.

So sadly, we had to delay the converting of cans to money at a recycling center.  Perhaps we’ll give it another go in the very nearby future.

Lessons Learned For My Son

My son learned 2 things from this last bout of crushing aluminum cans!

  1. Simple changes to the process can have huge performance differences
  2. The benefits of the compression process drastically reduces the space requirements for the cans in the bag.  A overflowing full bag was reduced to about 1/5 of the original size.  He was amazed, even if he doesn’t get paid sooner than later.

 

-MR

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10 thoughts on “Crushing Aluminum Cans, A Process Improvement”

  1. Good job providing your son with an early lesson in process improvement! Not to mention he learned how to earn money and work hard!

    Sounds like a great experience all around.

    • He’s starting to mow lawns too. He cuts both my and his grandfather’s lawns now.

      He definitely is learning money skills.

      Process improvement is a new skill I’m trying to teach him. Heck, I could stand to learn a few things in this area myself 🙂

  3. planting the seeds early surely has its benefits. i know someone who used to spend sundays with his son scouring garage sales and profiting from arbitrage (buy low sell high). the son is a very successful trader in NYC raking in 300k+ in his 20s

    • Wow, that’s great!

      We did eBay for a while, but my son was too young to grasp it totally. I meant to sell some cards and other stuff a few months before Christmas with my son, but got too busy.

  4. Nice lesson to teach your son. I’m not sure if its a true fact, but I heard that people well below the poverty line are some the most “green” people because they collect and cash in cans.

    • Ahh, that makes sense!

      In our case, we just hit up family and our own house cans.

      Actually, it’s kind of a disgusting activity really. But it’s quick, green and overall easy.

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