Adrew P.; The nickel/dime(depending on what era you grew up in) deposit worked with soda bottle because it wasn’t about recycling the glass, but recycling the bottle. Unless you returned an empty bottle a new(take out) bottle of soda would cost an extra nickle/dime. Unless a deposit scheme cost people money not to return used containers its doomed to fail, so if you can use any any deposit scheme to your financial advantage do it now while you can.

or at least crush them into little cubes

some friends and I once experimented with rail guns/coil launchers and had a pretty large array of capacitors charged to ~300v because we didn’t want to start messing around with neon sign transformers and achieved pretty small-scale results.

“Copyright © 2000 – 2002 by Sam Barros. All rights reserved. Removing any material from this site for display without consent from its author consists in an infringement of international copyright laws and can result in fines up to $50000 per infringement, plus legal costs. So ASK ME before you remove anything from here.”

First of all you don’t “remove” material from a website unless you hack it and take down the web page. If that’s all he’s worried about then 50 grand per infringement is a pretty reasonable price.

Also what if I hot link an image from his website? That’s not removing anything and his pictures are never stored on my servers so that seems like it would not be infringing.

After all that he isn’t even able to crush a can. All he can do is reduce the diameter by a few cm. I have no problem with experimenting and failing but this guy acts like he’s solved world hunger.

I don’t believe this technology could be easily adapted to serve this purpose, without several synchronized coils which all fired at once, turning the can into a very small tube. I don’t know how those coils would interact with one another though.

In the ‘coin shrinking’ field, the coil is often destroyed at high energies, I didn’t notice any of the sites mentioning this, is this due to the pliable nature of the can?

#4) This isn’t really applicable to a potato launcher, the force is all directed ‘inwards’ from the coil. It might be doable, but there are many much more effective techniques.

I donate all my cans to the fire department. The explorer post there (a spinoff of the boy scounts) has a bin, and they cash them in and by stuff. They chipped in on a big towing sled (snow mobile) for our snow rescue trailer, have helped with AED training, and other stuff like that.

Now, using the same technology here as a potato launcher……

If you put a can inside a caped pvc pipe, then a smaller capped pipe inside the big one, and sealed it, and shot it lots of pressure, could air crush a can? (eg: like a piston kind of thing)
that would be a cheap + fun project, and with an air compressor, id use it after every can I drink :P