Addendum to Crushing Cans

5 Nov

Floater’s Blog: Pool-less Date, November 5th, 2025

If you have read many of my blogs then you will know how much I like crushing the contents of beer cans – especially while floating!

If you read my recent ‘I Got a Flat!’ blog then you will also know how much I love crushing beer cans after they have been emptied of their contents.

In that posting I mentioned about how ‘blue bin harvesters’ will collect cans which been placed in a recycling bin to help generate some income for themselves. Well, on the last leg of a cycle around town I did the other day, my attention was drawn to a ‘binner’ who was pushing a shopping cart on the other side of the street. A large shining object was protruding out the top of his gathered items. I kept going in my bike lane and then thought, I need to confirm this – and wouldn’t it be a great follow up to my writing from just a couple of weeks earlier!

By the time I had turned around, crossed the street and returned to the location where I spotted him, he had moved on. A brief search around the block and I was able to spot him at the far end of a laneway.

Now, even I have some scruples when it comes to making someone who is already suffering through a less than perfect existence feel even worse about themselves so I set up my phone’s camera ahead of time and did a slow pass pretending to read something off my screen while actually snapping a pic of his pot of gold.

As I prepared to write this, I did my due diligence in the research department and found the deposit fee for a beer keg of 30 liters or more is $30 Canadian. So, I suspect, thanks to his scouring of the yards in the frat house region around the University of Toronto, he has gathered the equivalent of 300 cans in one fell swoop.