If you have an interest in sustainable living, and also fancy making some extra cash, there are various ways to monetise your green hobbies. In this blog, we look at some of the best environmentally friendly ways to earn extra money.

Refurbish old furniture

There is a huge market for antique and retro furniture, so if you regularly spot old discarded furniture that, with a bit of fixing up, could easily be sold for profit, then why not make a side business out of it? If you have any skills in carpentry or upholstery, then refinishing furniture is a great way to both recycle and make some extra money. Whether you want to restore antique furniture to its original grandeur, or you plan on updating it with a modern twist, you’ll be saving it from landfill and, hopefully, reducing the rate at which new furniture is produced and sold.

Capitalise on your green thumb

If you have a passion for gardening, you may want to set up a stall at your local farmer’s market. Farmer’s markets are a great place to sell local produce, so whether you grow an abundance of fruit and vegetables in your backyard, or are skilled in cultivating beautiful house plants and flowers, you’ll definitely be able to monetise your horticultural talents. Gardening, of course, entails more than just growing plants, so if you’ve got a talent for making beautiful garden pots, or have a particularly good compost heap at home, you’ll definitely have a product or service worth selling.

Recycle old metal

Metal recycling is a great way to earn extra cash while cutting down on consumption and doing your bit for the environment. It’s pretty easy to find scrap metal around the home; in the kitchen look for things like aluminium soft drink cans, steel soup and been cans, aluminium foil; in the bathroom search for empty aerosols and cosmetic tins; and in the garage look for things like copper wiring, old car parts and discarded metal furnishings or fixtures. If you want to earn a sizeable amount of cash for your scrap, check out verge side collections for large metal appliances like fridges and washing machines.

These sustainable hobbies are a great way to earn extra pocket money while doing your bit for the environment. If you want to trade your scrap metal for cash, Metal Men Recycling should be your first point of call. Metal Men Recycling accept all kinds of scrap metal and even offer a 24-hour pickup service for large items.

Did you know that around 80% of a car can be recycled including aluminium from the body, the battery, windshield and tyres? Sadly, thousands of cars are abandoned around Australia every year by drivers looking to avoid the costs of professional disposal, but the costs of this method of disposal are far greater than the cost of say, towing a car to a scrap yard. This week, we look at why you should not abandon your car and how you can make money from recycling it instead.

It costs local councils money

Whilst you might think you’re saving money by dumping your car, all you are really doing is fobbing off the cost onto your local council, who must jump through a number of costly and time consuming administrative hoops before they can collect, impound and eventually scrap or sell the vehicle. Of course, the time and money that local councils have to dedicate to managing abandoned vehicles is being payed for by you, in the form of council rates, which would otherwise go towards improving your community.

It’s environmentally hazardous

That rust bucket you’re thinking of getting rid of is full of highly toxic chemicals including petrol, oil, battery acid, transmission and brake fluid, diesel and coolant which can leach from the car into the ground (and eventually the groundwater) as the vehicle deteriorated in the elements.

It’s dangerous

Abandoned cars are a fire hazard as if they are surrounded by dry dead leaf material in the bush, they can spontaneously combust and cause a fire, or accelerate a fire that is already burning to send it out of control. Submerged cars are also a huge issue and can become a deadly unseen hazard for swimmers, wildlife, and water vehicles.

It sets a bad example

Aside from being dangerous and environmentally hazardous, abandoned cars often become a beacon for other people looking to illegally dump their rubbish, and can result in a large area being ruined by not only car chemicals and rusting parts, but abandoned appliances and household garbage which exacerbate the problem as well as create new issues (i.e. attract scavengers).

You can make money and do the environment a favour by recycling it instead

Abandoning your car is not only dangerous and wasteful, it’s more time consuming and costly than getting in touch with a scrap metal recycler. Metal men offer 24 hour scrap metal pickup services for all metal scrap and are happy to pay you on the spot for your old vehicle. We guarantee fair rates and can pay in cash, cheque, or by EFTPOS. To enquire about our pickup services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by calling 03 5941 6677.

This week we look at where you can find copper wire, and the different grades of copper scrap accepted by recyclers.

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Metal Men Recycling is proud to operate from the Melbourne suburb of Pakenham, which has been an important industrial hub for the region since the 19^th century. This week, we celebrate that history with a few interesting facts.

Pakenham grew up around the Latrobe Inn (Later Bourke’s Hotel, now the Princes Highway Hotel)

Pakenham was originally an estate first taken up in 1839 but once the inn sprung up in 1848 and the post office in 1859, it became a service centre for the surrounding farms, particularly the orchards in the Toomuc Valley and Pakenham Upper. In 1877, the railway opened and became an important part of the east link connecting Melbourne and other eastern towns.

Tynong Quarry supplied granite for the Shrine of Remembrance

The nearby town of Tynong was the place where the distinctive silver grey granite for Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance was quarried after World War I. Tynong granite is known to be exceptionally hard but can be split straight, making it perfect for use in a monument. The quarry created a lot of jobs in the area, so much so that a small boarding house in Tynong was established.

The Raleigh/Nestle factory gave Pakenham the growth spurt it needed to become a suburb

The Raleigh Preserve company opened a factory in Pakenham in 1951 which specialised in shelling and canning Koo Wee Rup peas. In the late 1950s, the factory was bought out by Crosse and Blackwell, which then began producing pickles and stuffed olives. Nestle acquired the company in 1960 and built an additional baby food factory in Pakenham in 1962. In the 1980s Nestle built a frozen food factory in Pakenham and eventually added the Lean Cuisine production line in the factory in 1985. In 2009, the Gippsland Food Company was created and the factories were bought by Simplot Australia. This long industrial history helped create hundreds of jobs and helped many families settle in the area after World War II. The factories still play an important role in Pakenham today, employing 230 staff and producing soups, sauces, and pasta as well as frozen and chilled meals.

Transpacific Industries and the mysterious smell

In 2007, Packenham locals began to complain of a recurring smell described variously as a ‘burning chemical smell, ‘the stench of dead bodies’ or a putrid smell that was able to infiltrate homes’. Transpacific Industries, an organic waste recycler was found to be the source of the smell and the company has since ceased to operate in the area.

Metal Men Recycling offer premium metal recycling services in Pakenham including offering cash for scrap. To learn more about our capabilities, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by calling 03 5941 6677.

Here’s a depressing fact: the average Australian produces 1.5 tonnes of waste in a year. But perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that a great deal of the waste is avoidable (for example edible food waste) or recyclable (plastic packaging and compostable food scraps). The shocking amount of waste people in developed countries produce has inspired many people to become creative about waste elimination and recycling, known as the zero-waste movement. This week, we run through five of our favourite zero waste bloggers to draw inspiration from.

Trash is for Tossers

One of the most established zero-waste bloggers is New York based Lauren Singer. She’s made a career from her ‘how-to’ videos on YouTube and her range of all natural laundry detergent, but her well curated website is full of very practical advice about minimising waste in everyday life, with posts on things like zero waste wrapping  and zero waste alternatives to ordinary household items.

Paris to Go

Parisian based blogger Ariana Schwarz takes a philosophical (and very chic) approach to the zero-waste movement, asking big picture questions like ‘Is Zero Waste Ableist?’ whilst offering practical advice extrapolated from her own zero waste journey.

Zero Waste Chef

Written by passionate San Francisco based cook Anna Marie, this blog is all about tackling the edible food waste problem. This is a practical guide for people who rely on the supermarket supply chain system looking to cut down on processed foods, improve their meal planning, experiment with fermentation and of course, minimise food waste.

The Rogue Ginger

Erin Rhoads is perhaps the most well-known zero waste blogger in Australia. Her blog is all about her personal journey to find plastic free living alternatives and minimise the amount waste she produces in her day to day life. This blog is ideal if you want to see how the zero-waste philosophy plays out in an Australian lifestyle.

#NOTOPLASTIC

A newcomer to the zero-waste scene, Jessica Renz’s New Year’s Resolution for 2017 was to use a KeepCup for the rest of the year but this ambition quickly expanded into an attempt to reduce the amount of plastic she consumed in her everyday life. This blog is a great introduction into the zero-waste lifestyle, as Jessica herself is new to the movement, so her posts are about the small steps she is taking towards minimising her waste production.

As our name suggests, Metal Men Recycling is a business dedicated to ensuring a valuable resource such as scrap metal does not go to waste. We buy and sell scrap metal at competitive industry prices. Get in touch with us today by calling 03 5941 6677.

Recycling as we know it today as part of the environmental movement first came to prominence in the 1970s, but it’s history stretches back thousands of years prior to that. For most of human history, production of goods of any sort was both expensive and time consuming, so most households practiced some form of recycling. Mass production and consumption in the wake of the industrial revolution changed all of that and recycling on a local government scale was implemented as a response. This week, we run through ten interesting facts you may not know about the history of recycling.

1. The first ever recorded instance of waste paper recycling is from 1031 in Japan. Paper is a precious commodity so it is re-pulped to make new paper and then resold.
2. Romans recycled bronze coins into statues to increase the value of the metal and during wartime, any sort of available metal was being melted down for reuse as weapons.
3. The world’s first curb side recycling program was pioneered in France in 1884.
4. The first Australian recycled paper mill was built in Melbourne 1815 and used recycled cotton and linen rags (a process patented in 1690) to make paper.
5. BHP Steel pioneered industrial steel recycling in 1915.
6. Henry Form pioneered car body recycling in the 1920s by recycling his Model T Fords to save resources and money.
7. The Great Depression forced people to come up with ever more ingenious ways to make ends meet with what limited resources they had. The concept of ‘dual use’ became a major selling point for manufacturers, and families did things like using flour sacks to patch clothes, and reusing biscuit boxes as lunch boxes.
8. During World War I and II, the US Government launches many national recycling initiatives in a bid to aid the war effort. One wartime recycling suggestion from the government was for people to return used animal fat to their butchers, as it could be used in munitions manufacturing.
9. In 1970 an American recycled container company ran an art contest to raise environmental awareness. Gary Anderson’s entry was The Mobius Loop which has since become the international symbol for ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’.
10. Today, a growing focus on the impact of the consumerism on the environment means that Australians are more conscious than ever about the importance of recycling. A government funded study in 2011 found that 51% of all waste in Australia is now recycled which translates to about 1090kg of materials per capita.

Metal Men Recycling is an established metal recycling business in Pakenham. We take all kinds and quantities of metal scrap and promise a competitive price.

When we think of world history and human evolution, we often think in terms of events, civilisations, and important figures. However, inventions have played an equally significant role in furthering humanity and many of the most significant objects happen to be made of metal. This week, we thought we’d look at five surprising metal objects that have changed the course of human history, and which you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Nail

Thought to have been invented around 3400 BC, nails made building lightweight wooden structures fast and simple. Prior to the nail, buildings were constructed from with either stones or with wood planks cut to geometrically interlock. The invention of the nail made it much faster and cheaper to build structures, enabling people to live a higher quality of life.

Transistors

Used as an amplifier for an electric current or switch a small current to a larger one, transistors were an invaluable invention that played a crucial role in the development of numerous important electronic devices including radios, televisions, computers and cell phones.  

Cast iron pot

The complex process involved in casting cooking pots was first patented by Abraham Darby I in 1707 and this technology was then used to create a wide range of important mining and transportation equipment including iron wheels, ploughs, machinery and steam engine cylinders.

Bullet

First thought to have been invented in China in the 13^th century, bullets (in guns) revolutionised the way that wars were fought by dramatically increasing both the range and speed at which weapons could be discharged, as well as the amount of damage caused. In the 20^th century, guns and artillery have become so advanced as to virtually eliminate hand to hand combat, previously a stalwart of warfare.

Coins

Thought to have been invented in Iron Age Anatolia, the coin marked a departure from the ancient bartering economy and the beginning of the currency system that forms the basis of the global financial sector today.

Whilst a single bullet or transistor is unlikely to have much scrap value, Metal Men accept all types and quantities of scrap metal and pay cash for the metal we receive. Get in touch with us today by calling 03 5941 6677.