Get on the Can!

Depending on how much snow we get in March, the year’s snowiest month, April can be one of the ugliest seasons. The yard is too soft to clean up, so the grimy leavings of winter are everywhere to be seen. On the upside, this is one of our favorite times of the year, because the woods are naked. Before the world remembers to bloom again, and after the drifts have melted, we like to look for ancient junk piles along country roads.

Collecting old beer cans is a peculiar hobby, but not really that odd, when you consider it as a form of low-rent treasure hunting. Yes, one person’s worthless garbage is another’s extra special garbage, and we enjoy having an excuse to get out and fiddle around in the woods even before the first hepatica and bloodroot bloom. Minnesota is actually a fine place for “canning,” and there is at least one chapter of collectors here that specialize in “rustlings”—more or less worthless cans that have value only in the eyes of the dirty-kneed treasure hunter, and bear no real relationship to the mint-condition cans that others discover in attics and garages, well away from the elements.

At the time when beer was first canned, in the 1930s, Minnesota had a brewery in nearly every city. Today, if you find a Kato beer can, or a Kiewel’s, or a Red Wing—among the Schmidt’s, Grain Belts, and Blatz—you’ve found something quite special.

These old cans are becoming rarer, of course, because they are disintegrating in the forest, helped along in their return to dust by the two hundred thousand tons of salt that are spread on Minnesota roads each winter. There is something pleasing and reassuring about these old tin cans in the woods, precisely because of their slow decay—ashes to ashes, rust to rust. They underscore the ugliness of plastic and aluminum, which appear to last forever, until someone literally removes them. Ten-year-old bleach bottles and diet Coke cans have not yet found a market among collectors.

Thankfully, aluminum is relatively rare in the woods, for one simple reason: Aluminum is the single biggest success story in the short history of recycling. Today, more than one in every two aluminum cans is recycled. Smelting recycled aluminum cans uses ninety-five percent less energy than smelting raw aluminum ore. This year, nearly two trillion pounds of aluminum will be recycled. The turnaround on a recycled aluminum can—from store shelf to thirsty consumer to smelter and back to store shelf—is less than sixty days.

Due to the high value of aluminum, the national addiction to canned beverages facilitates a special kind of sub-economy. It’s not exactly the safety net we should rely on for the indigent and the homeless and the disaffected, but it’s a start, and a balm in this new gilded age. For some reason, Minnesota has been a holdout in beverage-container deposits. We think the state could put an exclamation point on its reputation for general cleanliness and order by instituting one, as they have in New York, California, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, and Michigan (where it’s a whopping ten cents per can or bottle). Even the most recalcitrant conservative can see that this is a private program for the public weal, a point-of-purchase fee willingly paid to insure that more aluminum stays in the recycling loop and out of the ditch, while benefiting some of the most self-reliant participants in off-the-radar sub-economies.

It is interesting to see Budweiser and other brewers trotting out antique designs for their packaging. Locally, Stite Beer has developed an aluminum bottle, which is more forward-looking than backward-looking (whoever remakes the cone-top can will make a mint), but we like what it means. If you can bring yourself to develop a taste for beverages in cans instead of plastic or glass bottles, you’ll be left with the sweet aftertaste known as enlightened self-interest.