The aluminum can bin at the Haines Public Library is nailed shut, but a new, downtown collection point for recycling used pop and beer cans will soon be available.
Friends of the Library President Barb Blood said her group stopped collecting cans last fall, when buyer Alan Heinrich retired from the business after about 33 years. The Friends had collected cans more than 25 years and made up to $1,000 per year selling them to Heinrich years before Haines Friends of Recycling started.
“It was a good source of income for us,” Blood said. “But it was a big job and it was messy and bears were getting into it. Also, now there are other places to recycle.”
Friends of the Library has donated its collection bin to Haines Friends of Recycling, which expects to use it at a collection site at Haines Home Building.
Melissa Aronson, president of Friends of Recycling, said the additional aluminum will help her group. “Aluminum is probably the most commonly recycled product. The markets fluctuate, but we tend to get 60 to 70 cents a pound for aluminum.”
Per pound, that makes aluminum the group’s most valuable material after copper, Aronson said. “Aluminum is important. It makes a lot of other things happen for us.”
Blood said that Norm Blank and Jerry Blood were among volunteers who hauled the cans from the library to Heinrich’s property over the years.
Former Haines Elementary School principal Heinrich said he started recycling aluminum in 1981, after a meeting at about that time with state officials who were encouraging recycling. Heinrich said that he sent south as many as five shipping containers per year stuffed with aluminum.
Volume has decreased to just one container, in part because of other, local recycling options, Heinrich said. “I just did it for the library the last couple of years.”
Factoring into his decision to stop were problems with intermingling of garbage and cans, and attraction of bears to his Comstock Road home. Bears got to be a bigger worry as more homes went up on Comstock, Heinrich said.
Heinrich described his recycling work as more of a community service than a business. “We didn’t make a lot of money on it and it made a mess of my yard. We’d have aluminum foil and food wrappers blowing all over.”
Heinrich said all kinds of aluminum showed up in his yard, including scraps left by fabricators, screen doors and mashed-up riverboats.
“I got a lot of roofing in the early years” before steel roofing became the norm, and big hauls of beer cans when area sawmills were operating, he said.
“I got an airplane once. It was pretty amazing. It had taken off without a pilot and had flown into some trees. I went out there with an ax and got two or three pickup trucks full,” Heinrich said.