Aluminum Power

On Thursday I went by the scrap yard I sell various recyclable metals to and turned in the aluminum and tin cans I had saved up. I had seven pounds of aluminum and 3 pounds of tin, which the yard bought from me for $3.31. I plugged the cash into my Forex hedged carry trade accounts that at the time of this writing continue to clock in at about 64% interest per year.

Like my penny power project, this is another example of small efforts and small sums of cash being snowballed into something big. This is the kind of stuff that people tend to ignore and not bother with because the incremental amounts are tiny. I maintain that this is a big mistake - while it's true that occupying one's time with a low yield activity that interferes with the performance of a high yield activity is dumb, passing up a low yield activity that can be performed in addition to a higher yielding activity, without impacting negatively the latter, is worse. That is opportunity lost, and when done so willfully, it is a self-inflicted harm.

Mostly I've only been collecting and selling metal wastes that I have been producing, but now I plan to collect what I find as I go about my work, pest control. When I'm out and about doing that, I see aluminum cans all over the place. It would not impact my work at all to pick up them up (and it may enhance my work since people tend to appreciate someone cleaning things up - this will be good PR for my employer). Yesterday I got 46 cents per pound for aluminum, and since roughly 33 12-ounce aluminum beverage cans, dry, weigh one pound, each can is presently worth about 1.4 cents, which makes grabbing a stray can slightly better than my habit of grabbing stray pennies since the time expenditure involved is the same.