PC: BBC
A 13-year-old boy has turned thousands of discarded drink cans into a regular source of funding for food banks and charities in the West Midlands. Around 20,000 cans are gathered each week and taken to the family’s Solihull garage, where they are crushed and sold as scrap. Ryan came up with the idea after wanting to use his spare time to help people in need. What began as a simple collection project has grown into a community effort, with residents and businesses saving bags of aluminium cans for his family to collect. The money raised after costs is then donated to good causes.
The 13-year-old wanted something he could do in his spare time to support people and eventually settled on collecting cans as a practical way to raise funds. His father, John, helps with the processing and said the operation can take as much as 20 hours a week. The initiative aims to collect about 20,000 cans every seven days.
Ryan’s project operates through We Can CIC, a Community Interest Company set up around the collection and recycling of aluminium drink cans, according to BBC reports. John said the family has received substantial support from people in the community and is willing to continue expanding the collection. John said recycling is something the community wants to do more of, while the family’s experience has shown there is also a financial use for material that might otherwise be treated simply as rubbish.
The scale of the work is now considerably larger than a typical weekend project. People and businesses gather their empty cans into bags, which Ryan’s family then collects. The material is taken to the family’s garage in Solihull, where the cans are crushed and prepared for sale. The family handles roughly a tonne of cans each month, turning what would otherwise enter the waste stream into a source of income for charitable causes. That figure depends on contributions from members of the public as well as businesses that save their empty containers for the family. For residents with bags of aluminium drink cans, the arrangement offers a way to have them removed while directing their value towards local support services. That combination has allowed Ryan’s original idea to develop into a regular operation involving residents, businesses, volunteers, his family and local charities. The garage remains an important part of it, despite the amount of work involved in processing thousands of cans.
