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Collinsville man gets kick out of collecting cans for charity: ‘Instead of pumping iron, I smash cans’ – News

Jokerst, 78, who lives in Collinsville, said he is pretty well-known throughout the community for saving the cans. He has about 25 people who bring him bags of cans.

He processes them, stores them and when prices are high enough, he sells them and sends the money to charities, like a couple of schools for native Americans in South Dakota.

He said he has made a few thousand dollars over about 15 years.

“People say, ‘Why don’t you just write a check?’” he said. “It’s more fun this way. It’s more productive. I pick them up when I walk around. Instead of pumping iron, I smash cans.”

Jokerst removes the pull tabs and saves them for times when a school class might be collecting them for various projects.

“They get a kick out of getting so many at a time,” he said.

Then he stands the cans on end on his garage floor, takes his smasher, (a steel bar with a flat round plate on the end), and uses three strokes to reduce the cans to flattened disks. He counts them, rakes them together and gathers them.

Jokerst said it sometimes aggravates his wife when she can’t drive in because the garage floor is covered with flattened cans.

“People think I’m a little eccentric when it comes to keeping records,” he said, pulling out a thick book with listings of cans collected, people who brought them, and what they sold for.

Right now he estimates he has about 82,000 cans in storage. At 33 cans to a pound, that is nearly 2,500 pounds.

Although local prices are ranging around 60 cents a pound for larger quantities, he is holding out for higher prices. He doesn’t like to sell for less than $1 a pound. There are a number of recycling places in the metro-east that will pay for aluminum.

“I think it’s going to go up. The Chinese are going to need (aluminum),” he said.

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http://www.bnd.com/2011/03/04/1615987/collinsville-mans-latest-role.html

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