Originally Posted by
TheIrrationalist
It takes ~30 aluminum cans to make a pound, and the aluminum sells for about 65¢/lbs. So if you know of a place where you can collect 1000 cans, you could do so, and make 21 dollars. Of course, I have never seen that many cans in one place on the side of the road. There is a deposit on the cans in some states, so people who collect them are making 3x that or even 6x that by returning them.
If you could spend 5 hours at night collecting cans off the side of the road, you would need to collect 1670 cans to be making minimum wage.