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| Don Cosi on the wharf near Ballyhoo Restaurant |
Early in the morning, while walking Sparky among the cluster
of beached fishing boats near the Ballyhoo Restaurant, I noticed an elderly
local gentleman sitting on the nearby wharf.
He was manually crushing a pile of aluminum beverage cans, one by
one.
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| Heading off to the metal recycler |
His nickname is Cosi,
and he is apparently in his mid-nineties.
He told one of the waiters at Ballyhoo that when he was a much younger
man, he built wharves. Then, quite recently, his family convinced him to stop doing hard physical work and retire, but he doesn’t
like retirement. It’s too boring, so he
collects aluminum cans and redeems them for cash. Once
he has a bag of cans, he sits on the wharf and crushes them flat. This enables him to fit more weight in a
small area.
Some of the other can
collectors just bag up the cans and transport the whole load via two-wheeled bicycle
carts or motos to the recycled metal purchaser. Quicker, but in the end, probably equals the equivalent in weight to what
Cosi collects and crushes.
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| In BC, Canada everything gets sorted! |
We asked another of the islanders who collects cans from
along the roadway how much a kilo of aluminum was worth in scrap value. He said he is usually paid twelve pesos for
approximately seventy-one cans. That’s
about .66 cents US for 2.2 pounds of metal. That’s a whole lot of bending over.
Mexico is not the leader in what we northerners think of as recycling - plastics, glass, newsprint, cardboard, grass clippings, and yard waste - all those things that must be sorted, washed, bundled, or flattened before the garbage crews will remove them once a week from the foot of your driveway.
In British Columbia, Canada
(where we were from), there is a ten-cent deposit on every type of drink container.
The night before our garbage
pickup day, we would leave a box of various containers and bottles at the foot
of the driveway - wine, beer, pop, juice boxes, hard liquor - anything. Gone by morning! It was just easier to leave the returnables
for someone who needed the cash than to shift the whole lot over to a
recycling depot, sort the stinky mess, and wait in line for the cash
refunds.
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| Garbagemen separate out the aluminum cans |
On Isla Mujeres and elsewhere in Mexico, the roadways are littered with
non-returnable glass beer bottles, squashed plastic drink bottles, stray
plastic bags, and discarded food wrappers drifting in the wind. There are crews of municipal workers who regularly clean the roadway margins, but it is a back-breaking, never-ending job.
You can help by making it easy for local collectors to find your discarded aluminum adult beverage containers (beer cans!). Collect them in a cardboard box and put them out for the garbage guys. Hotel guests could ask at the front desk and encourage a rudimentary recycling
program for the aluminum cans.
Just keep ‘em separate from the
rest of your daily trash; somebody will treasure your discards.
Hasta luego,
Lynda, Lawrie, Sparky, and Thomas
Or
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