It’s the last week of harvest at Pine Island Cranberry, and our team, as always has been working hard and doing whatever it takes to bring in the crop every single day.

The team is already making plans for the big finish! At the end of the season, our seasonal team members celebrate with a pig roast. Longtime seasonal crew member Albert Torres heads up the project, which is partly funded by recycling. In order to make this easier, the little camp has a small can crusher set up. Albert thought the big camp could use one, as well. And that’s when things went a little…crazy.

“Albert came to us because he wanted a can crusher for the big camp,” explains welder Fred Henschel. “I just figured I’d go out and buy him one, you know? And then I saw how much he and the guys had collected out there, and realized he needed something heavier. Louis and I got to talking about it, and things just spiraled from there.” At first, they were simply designing something utilitarian, building it entirely from scrap. “The motor that runs it is an old pool pump I had at my house,” Fred says.

“He’d be through here every day for one reason or another, and would ask me, ‘you working on my can crusher yet?’ I’d tell him, we’re getting there, and he would tell me he needed it for the piggy bank. He was very insistent: ‘I need it for my piggy bank!’ And that’s when we got the idea.”

Yes, our Facilities/Equipment team built a mechanical, can-eating pig. (Which is probably not so strange, when you consider that this area is known as Hogwallow.) “Once we had the idea, we just went all out and had fun with it,” Fred says. “Coco came up with the idea for the crushing mechanism, and if you look inside, I painted it red, because it’s really the heart of the project.”

Fred just loves building anything, and really got into the spirit of the project. “I had fun making the pig’s face and tail; that was a challenge,” he says. “And then when I went to buy the paint, I saw the shade was called Berry Pink, which I thought was…berry appropriate. It should do a berry good job crushing cans!”

Indeed. Though the pig apparently has a mind of its own, and refuses all Coke cans. (Something about the structure of the can, the shop team says.) Allow Louis to demonstrate:

Louis admits he was a bit worried about “frivolous” spending, though the project only came out to about a hundred dollars altogether. “You can’t put a price on art, Louis,” Fred tells him. Sometimes it gets a little silly around here, but in the end, our team is still doing whatever it takes to make things better: for themselves, for the place, and for the environment!