Is Metal Ever Trash?

Our neighbor told my wife and me how she stopped her fourth-grader as she was pulling a bottle cap out of their kitchen trash can, saying, “Honey, put that back.

- Frank Hyman

It’s trash.” The little girl, schooled on recycling, smiled and said, “Mama, metal’s never trash.” That’s certainly true. I repeat that story every time my wife raises an eyebrow at my sprawling piles of trash, I mean, scrap metal.

I’m not above picking up scrap fencing and other metal off the curb. And I always take a look into construction site dumpsters. One builder had tossed a heavy, broken nail gun that was easily worth $15 at a scrap metal yard.

What’s This? 

Our FREEcycle column will provide ideas on ways to recycle things already on your farm to provide substantial savings, such as making chicken feed from scratch, recycling metal, creating free liquid fertilizer and more. In this column, we’ll show you how to recycle some of your natural materials and food scraps into a perfect soil amendment.

Every bit of metal from my scavenging trips and building projects — stripped screws, sheet metal, broken tools, worn saw blades, excess pipe — gets tossed into black, 10-gallon nursery pots by the back gate. That includes household metal such as jar lids, out-of-date keys and, of course, bottle caps. Because the pot has drainage holes, I don’t have to worry about it filling with rainwater. And because it’s black, it’s not very eye-catching — other than to my wife.