[GH85Carrera]

When we moved into our house, 27 years ago the former residents left a Sears trash compactor in the garage. It is HEAVY and not something I wanted to move, so I took it apart, and found two micro switches that one was bad, the other bent. I fixed both, and it worked great. No way was I moving it into the kitchen. So we started using it as a aluminum can crusher. Trash compactor bags are cheap, and it takes a while to end up with a block of aluminum cans. I would collect 5 bags of compacted cans and go to the scrap metal place and get $22 bucks.

I then did the math. The IRS was paying 50 cents a mile back then, and the round trip to the recycle place, left me with enough to have a $5 lunch. All that effort, for not much reward.

We still crush the cans into a block, and I take them and donate them to a fire station a mile away and they collect them from many people and then recycle them to buy articles for the fire station.

So a compactor for free for cans made sense. To put food scraps or just household trash in and make a very heavy block of "stuff" made no sense to me. We never fill up one of our wheelie bins that get picked up once per week. We have two of the bins, and we have the second one for spring and fall cutting of the plant debris of my wife's many flower beds.

We have a separate bin for recycling. All cardboard boxes and plastic bottles or containers go in that for every other week pickup.

A uncompacted kitchen trash can of typical trash gets pretty heavy. Take two or three weeks of trash compacted into a block, it would be really heavy. Most women would not be wanting to take that to the outside can. Of course, the only time my wife has taken the trash out or to the curb, was when I had my hip replaced, and I was using a walker.