This morning we crushed and bagged thousands of cans. Foil for Snappy had titled the area 'Mount Can', and that was really rather fitting.

Foil for Snappy might seem like a big local community organisation but really it's one woman, Karen, and her husband. They decided to recycle the foil cases from mince pies one December when they realised you could get cash for recyclable metal, and everything they raise is donated to S.N.A.P.P.Y (special needs activities and play provision York).

They have gone from mince pie cases to voluntarily looking after several aluminium recycling bins across the city and were tipped off about a can-filled courtyard.

This courtyard was like nothing any of us had ever seen, 25 years worth of hoarding cans. Piles of cans, bags of cans (within bags of cans), it was like the Russian Doll equivalent where every bag of cans you tipped out there was another bag of cans.

9 of us got crushing, carefully pulling out sneaky steel and bagging those separately.

if it's rusty, it's steel!

Within one hour we could see part of the ground and had filled 25 bags of crushed cans, but our pace accelerated as we'd emptied all the bags and could focus on crushing. I set a 30 minute challenge to finish the lot. Reckon we can do it?

Yes we CAN! (excited Katie)

This was not a clean task. Decade-old beer dregs, coke, tonic, a retro diet pepsi can that probably wouldn't be out of place in a museum. Drips of all sorts of liquid were flying everywhere. We were very relieved not to find anything too disgusting, just one giant spider and lots of snails.

1 hour and 30 minutes saw the courtyard cleared. A total of 43 bags of crushed metal and some very sticky feet.

Karen offered us some refreshing canned mineral water to finish, infinitely recyclable and much better than single-use plastic!