can anyone help please

COOLTRIKERCHICK

just wondering if anyone can help,

quite a few years ago i can remember a new article on tv, saying a man was collecting drinks cans, and he ended up buying house out of the proceeds.

when i say quite a few years ago, i do mean a long time ago,...lol... 80's/90's

i think it was in america.

what i can remember he was homeless, ( i think) and people used to drop cans by where he used to hang out, and in the end he bought his own house...

was just wondering if anyone knew of a link to the story.. i have been searching, but cant find anything....


would appreciate any help, or links to similar stories...


thanks....:beer:

paulwf

This thread contains some interesting info:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=527691

If we are generous and assume a rate of 5c a can (in a state using a deposit system) and just $100,000 for a house then the homeless guy would have to collect 2 million cans and not spend any of the money. I'm not sure if that is likely but maybe he could save up enough for a deposit.

I lived in Sweden for a couple of years and the deposit system on bottles and cans worked well, I also remember the days of deposits on Corona bottles in this country. It's a shame we don't still have a similar system.

moonrakerz

Not quite the same, but my favourite:-

http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/pudding.asp

COOLTRIKERCHICK

paulwf wrote: »

This thread contains some interesting info:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=527691

If we are generous and assume a rate of 5c a can (in a state using a deposit system) and just $100,000 for a house then the homeless guy would have to collect 2 million cans and not spend any of the money. I'm not sure if that is likely but maybe he could save up enough for a deposit.

I lived in Sweden for a couple of years and the deposit system on bottles and cans worked well, I also remember the days of deposits on Corona bottles in this country. It's a shame we don't still have a similar system.

oooo yes i can remember good old Corona, wonder if you can still get that, or was it bought out, and the name vanished forever...

thanks for the link Paulwf interesting that htey get paid for their plastic bottles too, just imagine if our government done this, say a penny a bottle or something.. i am sure you would get more people cashing in on it...

as we go through a few plastic milk cartons, water/drinks bottles a week.

We save all our alu drinks cans, and any steel food cans and take them to our local scrap metal dealer....dont get loads of money but went last week with a load, and got £8:D

foxgloves

I can remember when a firm called 'Alcan' used to be in supermarket car parks on set days (late 1980s?) and you'd take your aluminium cans along, they'd weigh them & pay you by weight. I used to save all my cans for a teacher friend who organised collecting cans at school for school funds. It's years ago, but even then before the explosion in metal prices, I'm sure she said it worked out around a penny a can. I can remember reading or seeing a programme about a chap who used to collect cans on a big scale in the UK, I'm sure one of the places he went was Donnington Monsters of Rock after the festival as part of the clean-up. I can remember him saying 'I get money for these cans & people just throw them away'.

babyshoes

I remember from growing up in Africa that the contents of the end-of-month shopping trolley were quite often determined by how many bottles we had - every supermarket had a bottle bank nearby and a small deposit was paid on glass bottles - all soft drinks came in glass bottles, plastic and cans were rare! Some months we didn't need to 'sell' any bottles, other months we would be scrounging for them in the shed. Different supermarket bottle banks had different systems - some paid cash, others paid in 'vouchers' for that supermarket.

I am sure that at least once as a child I scrounged an armful of bottles after an event to buy myself a treat...

The bottles were washed and re-used multiple times until they chipped or broke, I am not sure if they were re-cycled then or not, would imagine they would be!