The Can Man

Business is picking up for Patrick Shanahan, The Titan of Trash

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Jose F. Moreno / Philadelphia Inquirer

Six thousand pounds is just a number. A big, round number, for sure, but still just a number. It’s not anything that Patrick Shanahan is going to celebrate or hire a PR person to write a press release about. It’s not why he does what he does, and besides, there is too much work to do to pause and throw a party.

Too much trash to pick up. Too many recyclables to sort through. Too many cans — tens of thousands of cans — that need to be collected and hauled off to the scrapyard.

A lifelong Philadelphian, Shanahan spent 31 years as a teacher at the city’s Roman Catholic High School. He retired six years ago. To some seniors, the ideal retirement conjures up images of a gated Florida community, major bingo and pickleball time, and 5 p.m. outings to Cracker Barrel for the early-bird special.

To Shanahan, it means he has more time to pursue his self-styled urban renewal project. One man can’t clean up a city, but watch Patrick Shanahan try.

“I love Philly. This could be a beautiful city if we just stop trashing it,” Shanahan told Stephanie Farr of the Philadelphia Inquirer recently.

Farr wrote a wonderful profile of Shanahan that I’d encourage you to check out.

A writer is nothing without a good story idea. Farr got hers from an unlikely source — Liam Shanahan, one of Patrick’s sons.

“For decades, he has quietly picked up trash and recyclables wherever he goes, making the city a cleaner place without recognition or fanfare,” Liam said. He thought it was a worthwhile story, and his instincts were 100 percent correct.

Although he lives in West Philadelphia, Patrick Shanahan grew up in South Philly and spent a good part of his youth in FDR Park, a sprawling green space not far from the sports complex that is home to the Eagles, Phillies, 76ers and Flyers.

He takes it personally when he sees garbage befouling the park, or any part of the city, whether it’s a Whopper wrapper or a diaper or a Coke bottle. Two or three times a week, he’ll pick stuff up, separating cardboard and paper, plastics, and bottles and cans, stuffing them in big black contractor bags and loading them into his 2017 Prius and carting them to the appropriate recycling facility. His commitment to reducing waste and cleaning up the environment is unstinting — and longstanding. When he wasn’t teaching business or coaching tennis at Roman Catholic, he was pioneering the school’s recycling program.

“I think I am much more aware of litter than the average person, according to my wife,” he said.

While Shanahan has ramped up his clean-up efforts in retirement, that wasn’t always the plan. One of his favorite avocations was working as a basketball referee, but ankle reconstruction surgery he underwent early in retirement didn’t have the desired outcome, making high-impact activity off-limits. Missing his refereeing work, feeling adrift, Shanahan found himself in the emotional doldrums for a time. His doctor recommended that he read Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychotherapist, Holocaust survivor and author of a book called Man’s Search for Meaning.

“His message is that everyone needs meaning in their life, you have to have a why when you wake up each day. What’s your why?” Shanahan said. “I needed to feel like I was contributing to the world, and I was still useful. … I could no longer play tennis or referee basketball, but I could get out of my car and clean up the park, and it felt good to do that.”

Shanahan doesn’t discriminate what kind of trash he will pick up, but he may do his best work with cans. There are small mountains of them in FDR Park, the most common being Modelo and Miller Lite.

“Miller Lite must not be too good because they all still have a few ounces left in them,” he told Farr, emptying the can as he spoke.

It’s impossible to know how many pounds of glass, paper products and plastics Shanahan has collected over the years, but cans are different. Every time he brings them to his preferred scrap-metal yard, SD Richman Sons, a fifth-generation Philadelphia business that has been collecting and recycling iron and metal for over 120 years, his haul gets weighed. They pay him 60 cents a pound. An empty 12-ounce aluminum can weighs about a half ounce, which means there are 32 cans per pound.

Every time Shanahan drops off a load, SD Richman gives him a receipt. For six years he has saved every one of them in a plastic cashew jar. One recent delivery amounted to 57 pounds, earning Shanahan $34. It pushed his lifetime total over 6,000 pounds

Jose F. Moreno / Philadelphia Inquirer

If that was supposed to be a milestone, Patrick Shanahan didn’t get the memo.

Summer will bring more people to FDR Park, and the heat will bring more beverages. Soon, Shanahan will have removed 200,000 cans from the streets and parks of the city he loves. Four tons is on the scrap-metal horizon. He understands some people might think that keeping up with trash in a big city is a hopeless undertaking, but he told Farr he sees it a different way.

“It reminds me of a great quote: ‘It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,’” he said. “Of course, in this situation, the darkness is litter, so we can sit around and say how dirty Philly is or just do something about it.

“If you light a candle, and I light a candle, before you know it, it’s not so dark.