Shopping carts are one of the simplest forms of herd robot.

A single store can support a huge corral of shopping carts in a vibrant, active community. The shopping carts from a large store can make many, many migrations through the store each day, or rest outside within bounds of the parking lot, socializing and nesting with other carts.

As new carts approach mating age, they will spend more of their days roaming the perimeter of the parking lot, away from the other carts, far from safety. Sometimes they are maimed or destroyed by delivery trucks.

More often, they are removed from the lot by homeless people.

That is when the carts begin their "mission", or "vision quest".

Homeless people use shopping carts to collect and transport recyclable material. The urban garbagescape contains a rich vein of harvestable aluminum, glass and used Chinese food. Homeless people live close to the earth, so I had always assumed that they were collecting these recyclables to help preserve the environment.

Recently, that belief was shattered! I heard on Fox News that homeless people collect bottles and cans for money, and that they use that money toward the satisfaction of their own free will.

Could it be true? Could collecting cans in a shopping cart generate a significant income? How many cans could one of those carts hold? And what would those cans be worth at the recycling center? On Saturday morning, we decided to find out.

The first step was to collect a whole bunch of aluminum cans.

Luckily, I love soda. I looooooove soda. The citizens of downtown Sacramento also love soda. They looooove soda. On the other hand, they are not overly fond of expired milk, or the crusts on Round Table Ulti-Meat Pizza.

I also put the word out, I needed cans. Lots of empty cans.

Soon, cans were an integral part of my everyday life. I drank out of cans for breakfast, I drank out of cans for lunch, I drank out of cans for dinner. I can't even tell you how many cans I drank. To be honest, I can't remember much of anything from fondue night.

In seven short months, Eric, Nick and I had scrounged up a fat bounty of aluminum cans.

We were ready. Wait, we needed a shopping cart.

Most newer plastic shopping carts in Sacramento are manufactured by the Rehrig Pacific Company. If you know where to look for their logo, you can spot this breed at Home Depot, Food4Less, Albertson's, Safeway... everywhere.

It was a Rehrig Vista, which a company representative described as holding 10,100 cubic inches.

This one was female.

Rehrig invented the ubiquitous plastic milk crate, and went on to create these awesome plastic shopping carts. The innovative Rehrig Pacific corporation is constantly striving to build the products that future consumers will steal.

We tore open four bags of cans and counted 256 uncrushed cans into the cart. 256 is a loose-packed fill to the top edge. This is known as "grain-capacity" in the shopping cart business. We could have fit a few more, if we had stacked them carefully and evenly, using the latest configurations in the U.C.S.B. beeramid engineering database.

Already, we were making startling scientific discoveries: One can carry more beer with a shopping cart full of cans than with a keg-in-a-kart.

256 beer cans:

24 gallons

keg-in-a-kart:

15½ gallons

How much is inside a keg?

An average can weighed 13.3 grams.

MM! Just looking at these pictures makes me thirsty for soda! I love soda!

Next, we dumped out the cans and started crushing. I figured we would be able to fit 2-3 times as many cans into the cart if they were crushed flat.

My neighbors probably hated this. This was louder than the car rolling over.

If my neighbors had called my landlord again maybe I'd have been in trouble. Maybe this experiment would be a prelude to actual homelessness.

"Iron hands" Eric smashed them. Nick "Leadfoot" crushed them, and I, Rob "The Crinkler" Cockerham mashed them!

Our infant children, "Thirsty" Jonas and "Crazy legs" June also helped.

It was an extraordinarily hot day, and crushing hundreds of aluminum cans took a really long time, and a surprising amount of effort. 

This was loud, thirsty work.

The cart was slowly filling up with crushed aluminum cans.

With 526 cans flattened, we took a break. 

I was ready for a cold soda. I really love soda!

We were exhausted. We needed to re-think our crushing strategy, but we were too proud to consult a homeless dude.

Finally, a plan was hatched. We would use the tires on Nick's Jetta to crush long lines of cans!

This is probably how German homeless people crush their cans.

In no time, we lined up 171 cans in my driveway and Nick was poised to crush the California land speed-recycling record.

Nick's precision driving nailed both rails of cans. It was magnificent!

Fresh ground pepper.

Perhaps the metal from these cans would be recycled into someone else's Volkswagen.

It wasn't enough. We counted all the crushed cans into the cart, 526, still inches shy of the top.

It was hot, but we were determined.

We needed a whirlwind of tightly choreographed stomping, but we were too proud to consult Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas.

With a quantity-obsessed determination, and the inspiring work-ethic of a crew of homeless guys, we were finally able to fill the cart!

It took 853 crushed cans to fill the cart. 

This was a hell of a lot of soda cans. If we had emptied them into a tub, it would have totaled 80 gallons of soda!

It took exactly two hours to crush them all, but we were on cloud nine. We were going to be rich!

I try to do all my recycling at ReCyCo, but our shopping cart was in no shape to make the journey.

We packed up the cans and the cart, and made our triumphant way to the recycling depot in the supermarket parking lot.

The cans paid off, BIG TIME!

Our shopping cart-full of cans held 23.2 pounds of cans (10.5 Kg). In minutes, we had traded it for a brown voucher, redeemable for cash at the nearby Supermarket.

Our total? $28.77! Hooray! It was time to relax in the air conditioning and enjoy the high life.

After all that effort, I wasn't really in the mood for soda.

Califonia raised the Redemption Value of aluminum cans to 5 cents. The same cart of cans would now be worth $42.65.