Trash not so treasured as materials' prices begin to freefall

Every week, Mike Mains loads his Suburban with about a dozen 33-gallon trash bags of uncrushed aluminum cans and takes them to Bryant's near Danville for recycling.

This summer, Mains would get about $100 for a full load. Now, he's lucky to get half that.

"We're hanging in there and hoping it will come back," Mains said of the price of aluminum, which dropped drastically in the fall along with prices for other recycled materials, from scrap metal to newspaper to plastic.

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