11/28/1998

CLARE HOWARD

PEORIA James Cook is a collector of cans.

This tall and dignified man was once a truck driver, master of an 18-wheeler navigating the highways of America. Now, he rides an ancient red bicycle over downtown Peoria streets and alleys, retrieving beer and soda cans wherever he can find them.

Every day, he brings his bounty to a place where lives of order, reason and expectation juxtapose lives of need and disappointment.

Cook's is one of the latter.

There's little eye contact between these two subsets as they unload, weigh and collect cash for aluminum cans. The impending holiday season only sharpens their dissimilarities.

The first group pulls up to I. Erlichman Co. in sparkling vans and pickup trucks with crushed cans brimming over the edges of shopping bags from Eddie Bauer and Famous Barr.

They collect for causes: the environment, Boy Scouts, community fund-raisers.

The second group comes in rusted Oldsmobiles, decrepit trucks and thick-tired bicycles. They collect for food.

Their caches of cans are interspersed with metal relics: the blade of a snow shovel, old aluminum window screens, pieces of aluminum soffit.

Cook pulls up about 10 a.m. on a cold Saturday with his bicycle baskets filled with cans. He spends five to 10 hours a day collecting. This day he receives $2.60 for his labors.

At 55, Cook gets disability. He worked for a paycheck until a truck battery exploded, spewing acid into his eyes and leaving him legally blind.

That was in 1984.

Since then he's been a collector of cans.

He's seen prices for recycled aluminum cans drop from 56 cents a pound to 32 cents a pound. The drop in prices over the last three months has been unprecedented in the past 50 years.

It's the impact of the Asian economic crisis. Foreign countries unable to consume their own steel and scrap metal are flooding the U.S. market, sending domestic prices into a downward spiral.

For the environmental recyclers, it's a passing point of interest.

For Cook and others who recycle for food, it means subsistence incomes are cut in half. Incomes barely able to provide for meals with nothing left for Christmas gifts are halved.

While the steel industry employs high-priced lobbyists to protest the situation, there are no lobbyists for the cadre of recyclers in Peoria. No one is beseeching Congress on behalf of those who are collectors of cans. They have no trade associations and no foreign trade agreements or treaties.

So if there is bounty, reason and expectation in your life, perhaps you could share something with those hurt by a strange twist of global economic policy that cuts their already meager incomes in half.

A gift to the Journal Star Christmas Fund could mean a turkey and some canned food for those among us who are collectors of cans.