Aluminum cans are one of the best things to recycle 1) because we go through so many of them and 2) you can make a lot of money off of them because you use so many!

I remember one vivid time in my youth when my dad and I took several trash bags full of cans to one of those green aluminum eating monsters and we spent maybe half an hour feeding cans into it and we came out of it with tens of dollars, somewhere between 13-30 I think?

My family has always had a special trashcan in the laundry room (which is really my mom's sitting room) for cans and another one for stuff I'm not really sure of the reasoning of, I guess it was originally things they didn't want to burn because the metal would wind up in our cattle's stomachs, but we stopped burning our trash a couple of years ago and now we don't have cattle. It usually winds up full of cigarette ashes and butts, vegetable cans, and dryer lint (laundry room, remember?). It's had a distinctive smell ever since I can remember, mostly of stale cigarettes.

But yeah, we used to drink a lot of cokes (my brother was a big mt. dew fanatic and my sister loved dr. pepper and I'd drink almost anything also my dad, and my mom partook of many a diet coke) but now my siblings are gone, my dad and I pretty much swore off cokes (well until I came to college!) so it's mostly diet cokes that goes in there, and there's fewer bags each fortnight, but we still ship them off to my granny sue who is retired and hmm, impoverished so they're a small supplement.

But I just can't understand why you'd just throw good aluminum in the trash. I guess it's just how I was raised.